SC Connecticut News

Earl Bellinger, an assistant professor of astronomy in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has spent more than a decade traveling the world, using math to peer inside stars, and playing music.

His academic pursuits have taken him to Japan, India, Brazil, Germany, Denmark, and Australia while also involving him with MESA, the open-source stellar simulation software, and PLATO, the upcoming space mission that will measure the pulsations of millions of stars.

Now at Yale — still tracking stellar pulsations and making music — Bellinger says there’s nowhere he’d rather be. He leads the Yale Astro Machine Learning Group and is a member of the Institute for Foundations of Data Science.

In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series introducing new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Bellinger discusses what led him to study astronomy, his love of computers, and the music of stars.

When asked about his initial interests between computers or astronomy, Bellinger said: "I have always loved computers and computer programming. I started teaching myself how to program at around seven years old. I have an older brother who was also interested in technology; so when we got a computer, I sat by his side and watched him navigate the early Internet. I would stay up all night trying to learn how to write programs."

Regarding his entry into astronomy: "As an undergrad at SUNY-Oswego in my first-year physics seminar, we had a guest lecturer who was an astronomer working on pulsating stars. That led to me working with him and what eventually became my undergraduate research thesis."

Bellinger recalls a significant experience during his undergraduate studies: "I went to Brazil during the summer where I spent a week on top of a mountain with no light pollution; you could see the Milky Way in extraordinary detail. It remains the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life."

Describing his research focus: "Broadly speaking, I work on pulsating stars. What most people don’t appreciate is that pretty much every star is a pulsating star including our own sun but these pulsations are so slight we didn’t know our sun was pulsating until the 1960s."

"These pulsations are sound waves," he explains further. "So in a way stars are making music for us. We can see that music in the brightness of a star going up and down ever so slightly. And when you analyze that data you can pull out actual frequencies which reveal information about internal structure."

Bellinger also uses MESA software in his work: "It’s an amazing piece of software — an open-source stellar evolution code. You can enter conditions such as mass or chemistry and MESA will produce a simulation showing how that star will live its life calculating billions of years' evolution in about five minutes!"

Apart from science Bellinger is passionate about music: "I play any instrument I can get my hands on mostly guitar bass drums piano cello ukulele dulcimer anything really," he says adding that he self-studied music theory at 14 writing maybe 100 pieces as a teenager.

"In my 20s," he continues "I got interested in music production recording pieces making them sound good." Now having set up home recording studio he revisits those teenage compositions learning them again recording playing all instruments himself describing this genre as post-rock without vocals akin abstract art.