Dimitri Veras

The white dwarf ZTF J1944+4557 plays hide-and-seek: its light dims by 30% every 4 hours 58 minutes. The dust particles here are no smaller than 0.2 microns and they dim all colors of the spectrum equally. But the strangest twist: the pattern of eclipses changes faster than the orbit, and sometimes a

When a white dwarf tears apart a passing asteroid, we expect a dust cloud. But new analysis flips the picture: particle cohesion — those very van der Waals forces that hold sand grains in your palm — erects a kilometer barrier. Fragments smaller than hundreds of meters simply cannot be born during t