Rate My Professor Tim Bedding

Professor Tim Bedding is a professor in the Sydney Institute for Astronomy within the School of Physics at the University of Sydney. He completed his BSc with Honours in physics and PhD in astrophysics at the University of Sydney. Following his PhD in 1993, he held a postdoctoral fellowship before returning to the University of Sydney, where he has been based since 1994. Bedding has made pioneering contributions to asteroseismology, the study of stellar oscillations, establishing it as a key method to probe the interiors of stars. His work includes the first clear detections of solar-like oscillations in main-sequence stars using ground-based telescopes and leading the application of asteroseismology to thousands of red giant stars using data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. This has enabled precise measurements of stellar ages, core rotation rates, evolutionary stages such as the distinction between hydrogen- and helium-burning red giants, and properties of exoplanet host stars.

Bedding's influential publications include 'Amplitudes of stellar oscillations: the implications for asteroseismology' (1994), 'Gravity modes as a way to distinguish between hydrogen- and helium-burning red giant stars' (2011, 780 citations), 'Fast core rotation in red-giant stars as revealed by gravity-dominated mixed modes' (2012, 606 citations), 'Kepler asteroseismology program: introduction and first results' (2010, 583 citations), and 'Ages and fundamental properties of Kepler exoplanet host stars from asteroseismology' (2015, 450 citations). He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 2020 for his leadership in the field. In 2022, he received an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship worth $2.497 million for the project 'How Old Are the Stars? Looking Inside Stars with Asteroseismology,' which leverages data from international space missions to measure stellar ages accurately and advance understanding of Milky Way formation. Bedding's research supports exoplanet characterization, space weather predictions via solar studies, and training in computational skills. He actively mentors students and shares discoveries from TESS and Kepler missions through public outreach.