Prof. Boris Gaensicke is a Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick, United Kingdom, and is currently an ERC Advanced Grant Fellow, leading the project “WDPlanets.” His research primarily focuses on the study of white dwarfs, the remnant cores of stars with initial masses less than 10 solar masses. He is particularly interested in the evolution of planetary systems beyond the main sequence, compact binaries containing at least one white dwarf and their potential evolution toward thermonuclear supernovae, and, more generally, in observational studies of isolated white dwarfs and white dwarfs in binary systems.
As part of his work, he has acquired extensive experience in stellar atmospheres, ultraviolet astronomy, and large-scale astronomical surveys. In particular, he is making extensive use of the Hubble Space Telescope to study white dwarfs in the ultraviolet, where the rich array of atomic transitions provides unparalleled insights into their physical properties.
He leads spectroscopic studies of white dwarfs within the DESI, WEAVE, and SDSS-V surveys, which began collecting data in 2020. Over the next five years, these facilities are expected to increase the number of spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs by an order of magnitude. He is also a member of the ZTF-II collaboration, which provides exquisite photometry of the entire northern hemisphere—ideal for studying time-domain phenomena in white dwarf systems. The spectroscopic and photometric data of over 100,000 white dwarfs will enable extremely detailed statistical studies, as well as the identification of intrinsically rare stars that represent extremes in physical parameter space or very short-lived evolutionary phases.
Prof. Boris Gaensicke is an international expert in many areas related to the study of white dwarfs and cataclysmic variables. He is currently the recipient of the ERC Advanced Grant Fellowship “WDPlanets,” whose main objectives are to determine the chemical composition of rocky exoplanets and to further our understanding of the tidal forces experienced by planetesimals that enter the Roche surface of white dwarfs.
During his visit to the IAC, Prof. Gaensicke will work with Dr. Pablo Rodríguez-Gil on the study of white dwarfs that show typical signatures of ongoing planetary disintegration events, including compact gaseous circumstellar disks and transits of planetary debris orbiting the white dwarf. Initial studies of the prototype system WD1145+017 (e.g., Izquierdo, Rodríguez-Gil, Gaensicke, et al. 2018, MNRAS, 481, 703) have demonstrated the complex nature of the transits, revealing multiple co-orbital fragments that may interact gravitationally. The size distribution and geometry of the debris orbiting white dwarfs remain poorly understood, while rapid spectroscopy obtained with the GTC has led to the suggestion that differentiated planetary cores, stripped of their mantles, may survive for years (Manser, Gaensicke,… Rodríguez-Gil et al. 2019, Science, 364, 66). Prof. Gaensicke will also work with Dr. Pablo Rodríguez-Gil on the analysis of a large dataset of multicolor fast spectroscopy and photometry of white dwarfs exhibiting planetary debris transits, obtained with HST, VLT, and GTC.
