Data from the Gaia satellite are revolutionizing many fields of astronomy. I will present two related discoveries about white dwarfs: one is an extreme cooling anomaly upon phase transition of some white dwarfs, which stops their cooling for almost 10 Gyrs, and the other is the existence of merger products among single white dwarfs. I will show interesting solution to explain the anomaly and their implications for type-Ia supernovae and binary evolution.
BIO
Sihao Cheng is a postdoc member at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Perimeter Institute in Canada. He did undergrad study at Peking University and got Ph.D. at the Johns Hopkins University.
