On Friday, Mar. 11, a pioneer in the field of helioseismology, the study of the movements of the Sun, Timothy Brown, spoke to Colleen O’Toole’s Astronomy classes. Brown has made numerous contributions to the Kepler telescope.

“There are three kinds of astronomers. The people who do theory, they’re all math and computing all the time. There are people who do observations, they go to the telescopes and use instruments that other people built, and look at stuff in the sky. Then, they go away to their computers and look at data,”Brown said. “There are also instrument builders, and they are the people who make the devices—or, more accurately, they tell the engineers, who really know how to make things, what they want, and work with the engineers to get these things built. I’ve done all of those things in my career, but mostly instrument building,” 

Brown pioneered the field of helioseismology by leading a team in the creation of a device called a fourier tachometer and has recently won the James Craig Watson medal for outstanding contributions to the field of astronomy.

“I thought that Mr. Brown was really interesting, he had a lot of information on different telescopes in space, and black holes, and about how they discovered new gravity waves. We’ve been learning in class recently about gravitational waves and black holes, so it fit directly into what we were talking about,” senior Anthony Dyck said.

The class period was split evenly between an autobiographical presentation filled with Brown’s own sense of humor and an open-ended question-and-answer session which lasted until the bell rang.

“Astronomy is a good class, I think it’s one of those things that after you learn it, eventually, you can pull it into your everyday life, and look at the stars and know what’s going on,” senior Lueking Knabe said.

Brown has worked in many branches of astronomy, from helping to discover the composition of the atmospheres of exoplanets, to helping build the Kepler space telescope to physics.

“What I’m really interested in [currently] is young stars, they spin very fast. All stars rotate, but like people, stars start moving pretty fast, and as they get older, they slow down. The Sun goes around once a month. If you look at a young star cluster, say, 100 million or 50 million years old, there are stars that are going around three times per day. So, they slow down by a factor of 100 in a four billion year span… I’m trying to understand the details,” Brown said.

Brown also gave advice to any students looking to pursue a career in astronomy.

“You should learn as much math as you can in high school and more math and physics in college. Don’t specialize in astronomy in college, it’s a waste of your time. Then, when you get to graduate school, you can pick a specialty and get into astronomy and astrophysics,” Brown said. “There will be plenty of time to find out exactly what you want to do. You should try to get into a school with a big department with lots of choices.”