Konstanze Zwintz’s research focuses on a better understanding of early stellar evolution with asteroseismology. Asteroseismology – the study of stellar oscillations – allows to probe the interior structures of pulsating stars and has been a powerful tool for stars in many evolutionary stages. Konstanze Zwintz’s work focuses on stars that have not started full equilibrium hydrogen burning in their cores yet, so-called pre-main sequence stars. She is the pioneer and co-founder of the relatively new research area of “Pre-Main Sequence Asteroseismology”. Applying asteroseismic methods to stars in their earliest evolutionary phases will allow to investigate several open questions of stellar evolution, for example the exact determination of stellar ages, the speed of stellar evolution, the evolution of angular momentum between stellar birth and the arrival on the main sequence or the chemical evolution in early stars.
For her research, Konstanze Zwintz uses data obtained from space telescopes – such as the NASA missions Kepler K2 and TESS, the MOST and CoRoT satellites and the Austrian-Canadian-Polish Nano-Satellite Mission BRITE-Constellation – in combination with complementary data from large ground-based facilities, e.g. the ESO telescopes in Chile, the Canada-French-Hawaiian telescope in Hawaii or the SALT telescope in South Africa.
