Looking to the stars may provide the answers to life’s questions.

Steven Kawaler, professor of physics and astronomy, has been studying stars to see what their interior structure is like.

Kawaler’s research is part of the NASA-initiated Kepler Mission. The mission’s purpose is to look for Earth-like planets that orbit solar type stars. The mission was launched in March 2009 and will continue for three-and-a-half years. The team will be releasing recent findings in the upcoming months.

The data transmitted from the Kepler telescope include very precise measurements of the brightness of stars that are taken once every minute.

“The data that they’re obtaining on 170,000 stars is precisely the type of data that I’ve been trying to get from the ground with ground-based telescopes looking at one star at a time for two weeks at a time,” Kawaler said, referring to the data collected by the scientists involved in the Kepler mission.

The Kepler telescope is in orbit around the sun and only focuses on one specific spot.

Kawaler said his job is to take the data and use it to determine what is going on inside the stars.

He does this by looking at the vibrations created by the stars. The vibrations are similar to those created by an earthquake.

“You can use exactly the same physical and mathematical tools in stars to see what the internal structure of a star is,” Kawaler said, referring to the similarity of measuring earthquakes and star vibrations.

Kawaler is also studying the changes in the amount of light emitted by the stars. The brightness of the stars will change if a planet is in orbit around it.

“We are seeing just extraordinarily beautiful light curves of the stars and we’re finding oscillations and we are beginning to use those oscillations to learn something about the stars,” Kawaler said.

The information collected is put into the Kepler Input Catalog.

The catalog, however, contains errors.

“That’s actually an advantage to have mistakes because we kind of know, we think we know, that life developed on Earth in our solar system because the Earth is a good place to sustain life, but we have no evidence, no clue, as to how or where else life could develop,” Kawaler said.

Massimo Marengo, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, may know where life could develop in the future.

Through his research, Marengo found a star that is similar to the sun and may have planets orbiting around it.

The star, called Epsilon Eridani, has gaps in the disc that surrounds it. Marengo said planets could be causing the gaps in the rings.

“We couldn’t see the planets directly, but we could infer their presence by the structure of the disc,” Marengo said.

Marengo said Epsilon Eridani is about five times younger than the sun and the system of planets around it could be a younger version of the solar system.

Looking at the younger system may be a method of determining how the solar system developed.

“We cannot see what was happening to the solar system when it was less than one billion years old, but by looking at Epsilon Eridani we can have a pretty good idea of what was going on,” Marengo said.

Marengo is not certain whether  the younger system will be capable of supporting life in the future.

“The amount of the material around the star and the structure of the system may well allow it at some point to form life,” Marengo said.

Whether Earth-like planets exist or not, studying the stars may answer the questions society has wondered about for years.

Marengo said humans look to the stars at night because they know they are a part of something bigger and are curious about what exists in the vast universe.

“The real reason why we aspire to understand our origins is because we want to know where we are going and where we are coming from,” Marengo said.