White dwarf-neutron star and white dwarf-black hole binaries

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• Ross Church (Lund)
• Wednesday 31 January 2018, 14:30-15:30
• Physics West 117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Sean McGee.

Binaries containing a white dwarf and a neutron star are interesting for a number of reasons. Their existance and properties allow us to constrain the evolution of interacting binary stars, probing a number of important poorly-understood physical processes such as common-envelope evolution and neutron-star kicks. They may be observable with the LISA gravitational-wave experiment. Following gravitational-wave emission, their merger may produce luminous transients, and they are a possible candidate progenitor for calcium-rich “gap” transients. I will discuss the theory of their formation and of their ultimate destruction after gravitational-wave inspiral. I will also touch on their more massive relatives, containing a white dwarf and a black hole, and attempt to convince you that we have good evidence for the existance of such a binary in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae.

This talk is part of the Astrophysics Talks Series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Astrophysics Talks Series
• Bham Talks
• Physics West 117
• What's on in Physics?

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