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Mission Statement

 

The Institute of Astronomy of KU Leuven is a section of the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Faculty of Sciences, within the Group Science and Technology.  Its main missions are in the domains of research, education and outreach to the community.

 

Research

The Institute of Astronomy is an internationally recognised expertise centre in stellar astrophysics. Most of the science topics are related to the study of stellar evolution, in a broad context. Two Leuven expert teams are active in the specific areas of asteroseismology and of evolved low-mass stars.  A third team is involved in the development of astronomical instrumentation, both for ground-based facilities and for space science satellites.

 

Asteroseismology and variability

Observational studies of pulsating and variable stars have been conducted at Leuven University for half a century now, covering all stellar masses and evolutionary stages, but with specific attention to young massive stars, to red giants and to subdwarf stars on the horizontal branch.  The Leuven seismic investigations of stars range from instrument development and building, data gathering, data analysis, methodology for data interpretation, to theoretical modeling of stellar structure.  Emphasis gradually shifted from stellar pulsation theory, including asymptotic treatments, non-linear oscillations and tidally induced pulsations, to observational asteroseismology, in view of the opportunities created by high-resolution spectrographs and by dedicated space photometers for this field of research.  For the ground-based observational studies, extensive use is made of the Mercator telescope at La Palma Observatory (Canary Islands), owned by the institute, and of its twin, the Swiss Euler telescope at La Silla (Chile).  The institute is also heavily involved in asteroseismic space missions, such as MOST (Canada), CoRoT (French-led European), Kepler (NASA), and PLATO (ESA), as well as in the study of variable stars with the ESA cornerstone mission Gaia.  Specialised methodology for time series analysis and mode identification of non-radial pulsations was developed in Leuven and is continuously being upgraded and made available to the international community.

Evolved low-mass stars

In the context of stellar evolution, special emphasis is put on late stages of stellar evolution, in particular the AGB and post-AGB phases.  We are specialised in the chemical history of such objects, by means of detailed abundance analyses and studies of s-proces nucleosynthesis. Attention is paid to the effects of binarity on the evolutionary phases after core hydrogen burning, all the way to the pre-white-dwarf phase.  Another specific interest is to study all aspects of the circumstellar dust shells around these evolved objects, including the chemistry in that environment and the details of the mineralogy of the dust grains. A theoretical component is the research on the mass los and the mass-loss history of evolved stars, by means of modeling the molecular outflow through a state-of-the-art radiative transfer code developed in Leuven.  For this research, we are involved in ground-based and space-based observations of evolved stars in the Magellanic Clouds, the Galactic Centre, and the solar neighbourhood.  Extensive use has been made of data gathered with the past ESA infra red missions IRAS and ISO and with the NASA Spitzer satellite. We are presently heavily involved in the exploitation of data assembled with the instruments PACS and HIFI onboard the ESA cornerstone mission Herschel. Moreover, frequent use is made of the ESO instruments by means of competitive peer-reviewed proposals, in particular APEX, also with the goal to be ready for intensive and efficient exploitation of ALMA.

Astronomical instrumentation

Interest in ground-based astronomical instrumentation began with the plan to build a modest but strategic instrument set at the observatory in La Palma, Canary Islands, specifically designed for long-term monitoring programmes of variability phenomena.  The Mercator telescope is operational since 2001. Starting off with the refurbished Swiss P7 multicolor multiplier photometer, it was meanwhile equiped with the CCD camera MEROPE and with the high-resolution efficient spectrograph HERMES built by an international consortium consisting of the Royal Observatory of Belgium, the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Geneva Observatory and Tautenbury Observatory. A third new instrument is the Mercator Advanced Imager for Asteroseismology (MAIA) which is a 3-colour ultrafast-readout camera based on frame-transfer CCDs and designed specifically for asteroseismology of compact objects. Finally, we are involved in the design and development of the METIS instrument for the E-ELT.
 
Concerning space instrumentation, we have played a key role in the calibration of ISO's SWS and of Herschel's PACS instruments in which we are involved at co-PI level. Activities are now focused on the development of the MIRI instrument for the ESA share in the NASA James Webb Space Telescope. We play an important role in the development and calibration of the SAFARI instrument to be installed onboard the future JAXA/ESA mission SPICA.  In the area of optical space instrumentation, we contributed to jitter corrections for the CoRoT satellite and delivered the CoRoT N3 data product to the CoRoT community, which is based on our variability classifier for the exoplanet field data of the mission. More recent activities concern the delivery of software for the variability classification to be done with the Gaia mission within the DPAC consortium and the development of the instrument simulator for the PLATO mission project.
 
Besides those concrete institute involvements in instrument development, calibration, and data product delivery, the institute is successful in getting peer-reviewed based access to the instrumentation available at the European Southern Observatory and at other ground-based observatories, to the Hubble Space Telescope and of space missions to which the institute has access as being in a member state of the European Space Agency.

Education

At Leuven University, astronomy and astrophysics is taught at master level, as a full-time follow-up study of two basic courses at bachelor level as well as bachelor project work. Students with a Bachelor Diploma in Physics, Mathematics or Engineering can enter the 2-year Master in Astronomy & Astrophysics, covering 120 study points in the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS).  An additional option of a master after master education is the one-year Master in Space Studies, organised together with Ghent University and accessible to students with a master diploma in Science and Technology, in Biomedical Sciences or in Humanities. More information is available through the institute's website. 

Outreach

 

Quite often, research results obtained by researchers of our institute are the subject of national and international press releases, either through ESO or ESA, through Astronomy Picture of the Day, or through national TV broadcasts and/or magazines and newspapers.  Several examples are available through the institute's website.

Realising the special appeal of astronomy as a discipline towards a large audience, the institute takes up several responsibilities in the field of the popularisation of science. In the field of astronomy, this is done in the form of public lectures, intensive contacts with amateur organisations, and encouraging amateur astronomers to participate in the scientific projects of the institute. On a larger scale, the institute takes part in the activities of Leuven University in the framework of the biennial Week of Science of the Flemish Community, where secondary school students visit the universities to have a first contact with research and education at university level, as well as in the yearly fare called the Flemish Space Days.