October 15, 2021 7-9PM

Event Type: Lecture and Stargazing
Title: Tiny but Powerful: Hunting for Extreme White Dwarfs
Lecturer: Ilaria Caiazzo
Position: Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution: Caltech
Abstract:
White dwarfs possess a mass comparable to that of our Sun packed in the size of a planet, or even smaller, a moon! These incredibly dense and small blue objects are the most common remnants of stars (the Sun will become a white dwarf in the distant future), but they still hide secrets and mysteries. I will discuss how a small telescope at the Palomar observatory, ZTF, is allowing us to discover white dwarfs with extreme properties, like huge magnetic fields and rapid rotation speeds. These discoveries are leading to new insights into the lives of white dwarfs as well as how our galaxy itself has evolved over billions of years.