Jaymie Matthews

Jaymie Matthews is an astro-paparazzo revealing the hidden lives of stars by eavesdropping on their music broadcasts.  His interstellar iPod is Canada’s first space telescope, MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars), monitoring tiny vibrations in the light of ringing stars.  His research sounds more like astromedicine than astrophysics:  “ultrasound” images of stellar embryos, diagnosing hyperactivity in pre-teen suns, and taking the pulses of “zoomer” stars.  Prof. Matthews is also an astrometeorologist forecasting weather on distant exoplanets.

His day job: Professor of Astrophysics at the University of British Columbia. In addition to MOST, Prof. Matthews is on Science Teams for NEOSSat – a Canadian asteroid-hunting mission – and BRITE Constellation – a Canadian-Austrian-Polish mission to study the brightest stars in the night sky.  He’s Co-Investigator for the French CoRoT satellite, and on the Asteroseismic Science Consortium for NASA’s Kepler mission hunting for alien Earths.

In 2006, Dr. Matthews was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.