Donald Wayne Kurtz manages to simplify the complexity of science through his explanations. Born in the United States, he spent twenty-five years in Cape Town (South Africa), where he had initially gone for a year's postdoctoral experience. For the past ten years he has been a professor at the University of Central Lancashire (United Kingdom). He is also a member of the governing committee of KASC (Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium), in which hundreds of astronomers study thousands of stars observed by the Kepler mission. In the course of his working life he has spent more than 2000

Tim Bedding is an excellent observer of oscillations in solar-type stars and red giants. Among his achievements may be counted certain very interesting and widely applied empirical relationships now being used in the CoRoT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) and Kepler missions in order to obtain rapidly global parameters of stars using seismology. Currently, one of his new "work-horses" is studying the“mixed modes”: how they can help to extract information on the evolutionary state of a star. He has also worked on optical interferometry (measuring angular sizes of stars). He is at

Tomorrow, Friday 19th November at 7.00 pm, at the Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos in La Laguna, Professor Donald Kurtz of the University of Central Lancashire (United Kingdom) will give a public lecture on `The Songs of the Stars: The Real Music of the Spheres´. The lecture will be in English with simultaneous interpretation into Spanish. We humans are intensely visual creatures: ‘seeing is believing.’ But there are other ways to know the world and universe. For many species of bats ‘hearing is believing.’ 2500 years ago the Pythagoreans believed in a celestial ‘music of the spheres,’ an

Sarbani Basu specializes in Helioseismology. In her research she aims to determine, by studying oscillation, the internal structure and dynamics of the Sun and how these characteristics change with solar activity. She is also active in studying other stars, mainly using asteroseismological data obtained by Kepler. A member of the steering committee of KASC (Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium), she heads this international consortium's working group on star clusters and also participates in the modelling of solar-type stars. Likewise, she is interested in the use of seismology in

Steve Kawaler investigates the life and death of stars by studying their oscillations by means of Asteroseismology. A foremost specialist in compact objects, such as white dwarfs, he is a past director of the international Whole Earth Telescope network, dedicated to the study of variable astronomical objects; he is currently a leader of one of the teams that are analyzing data from the Kepler mission. With Carl J. Hansen and Virginia Trimble, he coauthored the book ‘Stellar Interiors: Physical Principles, Structure, and Evolution’. President of Division V (Variable Stars) of the

Bill Chaplin is an excellent communicator, as his students at University of Birmingham (United Kingdom), where he teaches Solar and Stellar Physics, would certainly attest. In recent years, this data analysis expert has worked on BiSON (Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network), a network of six observatories monitoring low-degree   oscillation modes in the Sun. Not long ago, he made the transition from the Sun to other stars and is currently leading a task group working on solar-type stars for the Kepler mission. In this interview he recalls the origins of Helioseismology and clarifies some of