white dwarf

It's the size of Earth with lots of oxygen, but not a nice place to be.

Image Credit: Sloan Digital Sky Survey Some acquaintances of mine in the United Kingdom have discovered two white dwarf stars that have a lot of oxygen in their atmospheres.  One of them, with...

A bitter retirement

Image Credit: James Liebert Those of you who regularly read my blog know that I often write about colleagues who are moving on to the next step in their careers, be it postdoctoral...

Looking for Planets Around White Dwarfs

Image Credit: NASA/ JPL-Caltech Our Solar System is such a nice, ordered place. Eight (or nine or thirteen) planets have been happily circling our sun for 4.6 billion years, and the whole...

Weird things in the night

Image Credit: NASA/ ESA/ K. Barbary In spite of everything we know about the Universe, there are still some things out there that we cannot yet even provide a basic explanation for. At the...

The continuing mystery of Type Ia supernova

After two days at a conference on stellar death and supernovae, it's become pretty obvious that the more we learn about Type Ia supernovae, the less we seem to know or understand. It's fairly...

Stellar Death and Supernovae

This week I am conferencing. I'm in Santa Barbara, California, at a conference called "Stellar Death and Supernovae". As you might guess from the name of the conference, we're spending the week...

Congratulations Dr. Jeffery!

Yesterday, University of Texas grad student Elizabeth Jeffery successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, becoming the newest PhD astronomer. Congratulations, Elizabeth!Dr. Jeffery's thesis...

Getting my white dwarfs in a row

Image Credit: McDonald Observatory Since returning from last weekend's teacher workshop, I've been working on planning observations with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, the largest telescope at...

McDonald Teacher Workshop, Day 1.5

I'm out at McDonald Observatory again for our summer teacher workshop on white dwarfs and the age of the Milky Way galaxy. This is my fourth year of participating in the workshops (look in the blog...

Writer's block

Sorry to have been quiet recently, I've been fighting a bout of writer's block. It's not a lack of ideas, it's just that none of them make for even mildly interesting entries. (Of course, this...