Dr. Meridith Joyce -- Stars, in Theory

About this episode

How do we know how old a star is? Unlike trees, stars don't have rings we can count, and determining their ages requires us to understand the complicated physics happening deep inside them. Stellar models are essential to this process, but even our best models have significant uncertainties in how they treat processes like convection and mixing. Dr. Meridith Joyce is a computational astrophysicist who works on improving these models, in order to better understand stars. In this episode, we talk about how we determine the ages of stars, what their oscillations can tell us about their interiors, and take a closer look at one particularly famous star: Betelgeuse.