Asteroseismology and the Infrared

Abstract

Asteroseismolgy is a mature technique allowing to study the internal structure of pulsating stars. This technique has been successfully applied to the sun where it allowed for the first time to determine the boudaries of the convective zone and the dependency of rotation with depth and solar latitude. More and higher precision observations revealed stable pulsation for a large variety of stars, covering most of the parameter space of the HR diagram. With the already operating (MOST) and coming space missions (COROT, KEPLER) we hope to have a powerful tool at hand which allows to test directly theories of stellar structure and evolution on a large variety of individual stars. Hitherto, all these exciting developments are based on observations in the visible spectral domain. What can we expect from IR?