Caltech Astronomy Tea Talk
18 May 2015I’m in Pasadena, CA at Caltech giving the Astronomy Tea Talk on The Long-Term Evolution of White Dwarf Merger Remants.
Zero Temperature White Dwarfs
26 Mar 2015Any fool can make a white dwarf. — Icko Iben Jr. (via HKT)
I often find it useful to have a table of properities of zero temperature white dwarfs for quick-and-dirty calculations. This table has the mass, radius, and central density (as well as the logarithmic derivatives of those quantities with respect to one another). You can download the Mathematica notebook that generated it.
These models assume an ideal, zero-temperature Fermi gas with an electron fraction of 0.5. If you care about the effects of Coulomb corrections, general relativity, etc., you’ll need to look into more sophisticated models. Frank Timmes has a cold white dwarf code on his website.
AAS 225
04 Jan 2015I’m in Seattle, Washington at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society presenting two posters on behalf of The Berkeley Compass Project.
along with a research poster
Partial Solar Eclipse
23 Oct 2014There was a partial solar eclipse visible in Berkeley today.
Even the theorists got to feel like astronomers for a moment.
Thanks to Geoff Marcy for the photos.
Binary Systems: Their Evolution and Environments
01 Sep 2014I’m in Ulaanbataar, Mongolia at a conference on binary systems presenting a poster entitled The Evolution of ONeMg Cores with MESA.
