NASA's $550 million Kepler telescope was built to study planets going around other stars and designed to last three years.

Now soon to enter its fifth year, it has some broken parts and is no longer suitable for that research, so the space organisation invited suggestions from the public on how to further make use of the telescope.

This week the telescope's scientific team chose the ANU's Brad Tucker and his US-based team's proposal to take to NASA for approval.

Dr Tucker said he planned to use the telescope to study between 10,000 and 20,000 galaxies outside our own, looking at the activity around the black holes at the centre of them and at exploding stars.

He has been running a similar, smaller project using Kepler for the past few years, and found damage to the telescope had no effect on the work.

Dr Tucker said the research was revolutionising scientists' understanding of how stars live and die.

"We've found four stars that have blown up in these other galaxies already, and each one is unique and has told us something that we never thought possible before," he said.

Dr Tucker said Kepler was the only telescope that could identify shock waves coming out of stars before they blew up, which would tell researchers the mass of the star, its age and type.

"If NASA decides to extend and keep allowing this telescope to operate in space, then we will be able to do our program," he said.

The team's research would be conducted alongside another project to find planets using a different technique.

Dr Tucker was born in the US and came to Canberra in 2008 to study his PhD under acclaimed astronomer Brian Schmidt, now a Nobel prize winner.

Dr Tucker now divides his time between the ANU and the University of California Berkeley and will fly to the US on Friday to announce his findings at a conference on Kepler.