Conny Aerts

Recipient of the 2022 Kavli Prize for Astrophysics. Shared with Roger Ulrich and Jørgen Christensen-Dalsgaard.

Source, The 2022 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics. www.kavliprize.org

"Conny Aerts is a leading figure of the “second generation” of asteroseismology. Her remarkable involvement in observational approaches to asteroseismology, both from the ground and from space, using data from CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS, has had a very strong impact. While Christensen-Dalsgaard’s work is mainly concerned with low mass cool stars and the Sun, Aerts is widely known for her work on massive hot stars, extending the impact of asteroseismology across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. She is a leader in probing the interaction between pulsation, rotation, and stellar winds through an integrated approach, taking advantage of changing spectral line shapes, as well as photometric variations. In particular, she developed clever methods to identify pulsation modes in massive stars, opening the door to the modeling of their interiors. Aerts also pioneered a rigorous methodology to identify and model gravito-inertial modes in rapidly rotating stars, allowing estimates of rotation and mixing in stars with masses between 1.3 and 40 solar masses. Thus, her work has enabled the first quantitative estimates of near-core and envelope mixing, leading to significant improvements in stellar evolution theory."

Prizes and recognition

• 2010 - elected Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
• 2011 - elected Member of the Royal Flemish Academy for Sciences and Arts.
• 2012 - Francqui prize.
• 2016 - Commander of the Order of Leopold.
• 2017 - Hintze Lecture at Oxford University, entitled "Starquakes expose stellar heartbeats".
• 2018 - ESA Lodewijk Woltjer Lecture for her work in the field of asteroseismology.
• 2019 - asteroid 413033 Aerts was named in her honor.
• 2020 - Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) Excellence Prize in Exact Sciences.
• 2022 - the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics.