Media Release - For Immediate Release

May 13 2010

Scholarship Aids Student's Look Into Stars

Astronomy student Michael Gruberbauer uses satellite data to determine the size and composition of distant stars. He was one of 174 doctoral students to win a Vanier Scholarship worth $50,000 a year for three years.

A Saint Mary’s student who uses satellite data to look into the heart of distant stars has received a prestigious scholarship worth $150,000 over three years.

Michael Gruberbauer is one of 174 students across Canada to receive a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship as part of a national program designed to attract and retain world-class doctoral students during their studies at Canadian universities.

“The Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship program is an important part of the Government of Canada’s science and technology strategy,” Industry Minister Tony Clement said Thursday. “By helping our universities attract and retain the world’s top doctoral students, the program is helping us develop and apply leading-edge knowledge, grow a world-class workforce, and position Canada as a true destination of choice for the world’s top students and researchers.”

Each recipient was chosen as a result of their demonstrated leadership skills and high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies in the social sciences and humanities, natural sciences and engineering, and health research.

Gruberbauer, 26, came to the University in July 2009 after collaborating with Saint Mary’s Professor Dr. David Guenther and an international team of researchers for four years on projects at the University of Vienna in Austria.

The focus of Gruberbauer’s work is stellar seismology ("asteroseismology"), a small but increasingly important field that looks at the pulsations of stars as a way of determining their structure. Some stars expand and contract periodically, causing tiny but measurable changes in their brightness. By understanding these oscillations, he said researchers can draw conclusions about the stars' masses, ages, and composition.

Gruberbauer helped advancing the field at the University of Vienna as part of an team working with the data obtained by MOST, a briefcase-sized Canadian space telescope launched in June 2003, and the first one explicitly designed for stellar seismology.
The MOST program was expected to last a year and provide light variation data from less than two dozen stars. Gruberbauer says the satellite is still in orbit and has already provided data from more than a thousand stars, some of them hundreds of light years away.

“It has been a small and dynamic working group so from the beginning I had almost unlimited access to the data.”

As a result of his involvement and papers he published, he was asked to write data processing software for CoRoT, a much larger French satellite telescope program and he has worked with the team dedicated to the Kepler mission, a search for habitable planets. CoRoT is sending information of more than 10,000 stars and Kepler continuously and simultaneously observes more than 150,000 stars.

With the financial support afforded by the Vanier Scholarship, Gruberbauer said he will be able to stay connected with his international colleagues (e.g., in Vienna, Japan, Poland and Russia) and attend conferences that will allow him to stay at the upper echelon of his field. He said Saint Mary’s already has an excellent inventory of equipment and an impressive library, so the funding can be spent on solidifying his networks.

Dr. Terry Murphy, Vice President of Research and Graduate Studies at Saint Mary's, said everyone is proud of Gruberbauer's work, but he also sees the award as evidence the University made the right decision a few years ago when it decided to focus on niche areas of research that could have national and international implications rather than trying to be all things to all people.

Although Gruberbauer's career is still in its infancy, he said he’s proud of his role as a pioneer in using satellite data for stellar seismology.

“Everyone learned from us. Without our experiences through MOST follow-up missions would have had many problems. We encountered these problems first and learned how to deal with them to make MOST a great success.”

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For More Information:

Steve Proctor
External Affairs
Saint Mary's University
(902) 420.5513
E-mail: steve.proctor@smu.ca
www.smu.ca

This page last modified Monday, 10-Jan-2011 15:35:42 AST