What is Galactic archaeology?
Galactic archaeology uses the ages, chemistry and orbits of stars to work out how the Milky Way was assembled.
Field guide
The science, institutions and machines behind my work, one minute each, with sources.
What is asteroseismology?
Asteroseismology measures a star's size and mass, and through models its age, from the way the star vibrates.
What is Gaia?
Gaia is an ESA space telescope that mapped where nearly two billion stars are and how they move.
What are ESO and the Very Large Telescope?
ESO is an intergovernmental observatory that builds and runs large telescopes in Chile, among them the Very Large Telescope at Paranal.
What is INAF?
INAF is Italy's national institute for astrophysics, and its research centres include observatories in Bologna and Padova.
What are IA and FCT?
IA is a Portuguese research institute for astronomy and space science, and FCT is the public agency that funds research in Portugal.
What is HAYDN?
HAYDN is a proposed space telescope to measure the vibrations of stars in crowded clusters, where today's missions cannot tell the stars apart.
What is PLATO?
PLATO is a European space telescope made of 26 cameras that will search more than 200,000 stars for Earth-sized planets and measure those stars through their oscillations.
What is Ariel?
Ariel is a European space telescope that will read the atmospheres of about a thousand planets around other stars, and it needs to know each host star well.
What is a supercomputer?
A supercomputer links thousands of processors with a fast network, so that one scientific job can use far more computing power than any single machine.
What are TESS and Kepler?
Kepler and TESS are NASA space telescopes that track the brightness of many stars for weeks to years, long enough to see them oscillate.
What does machine learning do with stars?
Machine learning carries measurements from well-studied stars over to millions of others, and finds groups of stars that nobody labelled.