In November 2024, a manuscript led by graduate student and BUWD member Lou Baya Ould Rouis (Ould Rouis, Hermes, Gaensicke et al. 2024) was accepting which showed that the most massive white dwarfs (>0.8 solar masses) show metal pollution significantly less frequently than more normal-mass white dwarfs. Specifically, just 11% of white dwarfs that begin […]
A story we ❤️about how exploring the Universe can re-ignite passion. And we don't mind that it's about looking at our white dwarf spectra in @jjhermes.bsky.social group 🤩🔭 www.bu.edu/articles/202… [image or embed] — Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (@sdssurveys.bsky.social) December 12, 2024 at 3:58 PM BU White Dwarf researcher Ariyana Bonab was featured in a November […]
In June 2024, a manuscript led by graduate student and BUWD member Joseph Guidry (Guidry, Hermes, De et al. 2024) took a look at infrared variability of white dwarfs as seen over many years from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, discovering dozens of new infrared-variable white dwarfs that are likely to be […]
Massive congratulations to Dr. Tyler Heintz, who successfully defended his PhD dissertation on Tuesday July 23, 2024! Tyler has been at BU throughout the entire history of the BUWD research group, and has become expert in the reliability of white dwarf cosmochronology (age-dating white dwarf stars).
Three members of the BU White Dwarf group attended the 23rd European Workshop on White Dwarfs, held in July 2024 in Barcelona. We will be hosting the 24th meeting in Summer 2026 in Boston!
In May 2024, a manuscript led by graduate student and BUWD member Tyler Heintz (Heintz, Hermes, Tremblay et al. 2024) announced the most detailed test of white dwarf ages measured from spectroscopic fits in wide WD+WD binaries. By comparing the age estimates of wide pairs of stars that should have both been born at the […]
In April 2024, a manuscript led by former BU undergraduate student and BUWD member Maya Steen (Steen, Hermes, Guidry et al. 2024) detailed one of the first systematic analyses of Gaia DR3 multi-epoch light curves, this focused on white dwarfs. Roughly 1300 candidate white dwarfs have Gaia light curves (spanning roughly 1000 days with visits […]
In January 2024, a manuscript led by Susan Mullally from Space Telescope Science Institute and including members of the BUWD group (Mullally et al. 2024) announced that JWST has directly images giant planet candidates around two metal-polluted white dwarf stars. The two planet candidates (JWST/MIRI images shown above) are consistent with 1-7 Jupiter-mass planets on […]
Former BU White Dwarf researcher Madi VanWyngarden, who worked with us in Summer 2021 and helped with our discovery of many new pulsating white dwarfs in TESS, has recently been honored with a 2023 Universities Space Research Association (USRA) Distinguished Undergraduate Award. Madi is one of only five recipients of this year’s award, and the […]
In November 2023, a manuscript led by Matthew Green from the Max-Planck-Institut für Astronomie in Heidelberg, Germany and including members of the BUWD group (Green, Hermes, Barlow et al. 2023) announced the discovery of the shortest-period binary system yet found by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)! Although TESS is tuned to finding transiting exoplanets, […]