Physics Colloquium with Lars Bildsten on Hearing the Stars

Space-based observations from the Kepler satellite have provided a remarkable new tool for studying stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way.  Simply by measuring how bright a star is over many years, we can now directly measure its mass and radius, and sometimes its rate of rotation and internal magnetic field. This has now been done for tens of thousands of stars across the Milky Way, also allowing us to identify those few stars that are in short-lived phases of their evolution. It's a great story of how theory and observation, together, can make a remarkable impact on our understanding of the Universe.