The BUWD group continues observational efforts to understand the emergence of strong magnetic fields in white dwarf stars as they cool down with age. In June 2023, BUWD group members helped in the discovery of two new stars with variable, strongly magnetic Balmer emission lines corresponding to surface magnetic fields more than 5 MG (more […]
In September 2022, a manuscript led by undergraduate student at High Point University, Bryce Smith, and including members of the BUWD group has been published (Smith, Barlow, Rosenthal, Hermes & Schaffenroth 2022), which announces the discovery of an unseen, cool white dwarf using the stable pulsations of a stripped red giant star. This work implements […]
Four members of the BU White Dwarf group traveled to present research results at the 22nd European Workshop on White Dwarfs, this summer held in Tübingen, Germany. The conferences in this series are typically biannual and feature more than 150 international researchers focused on the endpoints of stars, planets, and binary systems.
In June 2022, a manuscript led by BUWD graduate student Tyler Heintz was accepted for publication that empirically tested the reliability of white dwarf stars as age indicators. This extensive work was funded by the NSF and used more than 1250 widely separated (>100 au) pairs of white dwarfs to quantify how accurate their ages […]
In February 2022, a manuscript led by Jay Farihi from University College London and including members of the BUWD group (Farihi, Hermes, Marsh, et al. 2022) announced the discovery of a remarkable white dwarf that hosts the first planetary debris found in the habitable zone of a retired solar system. The white dwarf, WD1054-226, started […]
In January 2022, a manuscript led by Alejandra Romero from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil announced the outcome of a large search for bright new pulsating white dwarfs: in the first three years of the TESS mission we have discovered 74 new pulsating hydrogen-atmosphere (ZZ Ceti) white dwarfs. The work […]
In January 2022, Deputy Project Scientist for JWST Susan Mullally and members of the BUWD group announced the first results of a project to monitor nearly all possible spectrophotometric standards that are planned to calibrate the high-precision observations undertaken by the recently launched 6.5-meter James Webb Space Telescope. Using another NASA mission, TESS, we found […]
In October 2021, former BUWD group member Isaac Lopez led a global collaboration announcing the discovery, characterization with TESS, and asteroseismic modeling of the pulsations in the first extremely low-mass white dwarf observed from space: GD 278. Using a method to select variable white dwarfs from Gaia pioneered by our group, we first saw pulsations […]
In one of the first science results from SDSS-V, collaborators led by Harvard graduate student Vedant Chandra have discovered a double-lined, double-white-dwarf binary orbiting one another every 99 minutes in a paper that was recently accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal. The two white dwarfs will merge into a roughly 0.85 solar-mass remnant in […]
In June 2021 work led by researchers in the BU White Dwarf group discovered that the partly burnt runaway star LP 40-365 (also known as GD 492) rotates every 8.9 hours using archival data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This relatively long rotation period likes adds more […]