Larger and larger telescopes have allowed us to look farther and farther into space and learn about different objects that inhabit those realms and the phenomena that give rise to them. But telescopes are powerless when it comes to looking into the hearts of stars; all they tell us about a star is what it is like on the surface. Till very recently we have had to depend on purely theoretical considerations to determine the internal processes of a star.
In the 1960s it was discovered that the Sun seems to pulsate, and within 10 years it was shown that the frequencies with which the sun pulsates are related to the interior of the Sun. This means that pulsations can be used to peer through the opaque layers of the Sun star and learn about the interior. We have been able to study the interior of the Sun using these techniques since the 1990s. NASA’s Kepler satellite (launched in 2009) is now allowing us to conduct similar studies of other stars and test whether our theoretical descriptions of stars is correct. In this talk I shall describe how these data are gathered and why these can be used to study stars. I shall also highlight some of the important results obtained using asteroseismic techniques.