John Lester
Professor
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
University of Toronto
Canada
Biography
I study the physics in stellar atmospheres. The physics is intriguing because the conditions, which cannot be recreated in our labs, are changing extremely rapidly between the dense stellar interior and the near vacuum of space. However, we have the great advantage of being able to observe directly the brightness and spectrum of the stellar atmosphere. A recent revolutionary observational development is the technique of optical/infrared interferometry that resolves the surfaces of the nearer stars. My approach concentrates on the bright stars that can be observed in the greatest detail, and to interpret those observations using computer models
Research Interest
Measurement of stellar spectral energy distributions, observations of stellar convection, high resolution stellar spectroscopy, models of stellar atmospheres.
