The outburst in GD 1212
In August 2026, a manuscript led by BUWD PI JJ Hermes (Hermes, Bell, Dublin, et al. 2026) was published exploring an extreme example of an “outburst” in the pulsating white dwarf GD 1212. The outburst was likely powered by a parametric resonance, where mode energy from the stellar pulsations rapidly transferred from driven to damped modes; those waves broke at the surface, heating the photosphere by 850 K in just a few hours, getting nearly 20% brighter overall. Some day in a few billion years our Sun will probably undergo something similar. The manuscript has been accepted in The Astrophysical Journal.