About me
I am a Warwick Prize fellow in the Warwick Astronomy & Astrophysics group. My main research interest is in white dwarf stars, where I am currently investigating survivors of white dwarf explosions, white dwarf magnetism, and the initial-final mass relation.
White Dwarfs
White dwarfs are the dense cores of former stars like our Sun, which represent the end-state of more than 95% of main-sequence stars overall. These stellar remnants, having exhausted their internal supply of hydrogen and helium fuel, do not undergo any nuclear fusion in their interiors (being composed mostly of carbon and oxygen). Instead white dwarfs can be thought of as stellar embers, slowly radiating away their internal heat over billions of years, where the oldest white dwarfs in the Galaxy have cooled from an initial 100,000 K to a relatively cool 3,000 K.
My primary tool in studying white dwarfs is spectroscopy, which astronomers like myself can probe the physical conditions in the outer layers of stars. This allows the measurement of the chemical composition, temperature, surface gravity, pressure, density, and even the presence of magnetic fields.