Kevin B. Burdge

Graduate Student

Research Areas: Physics

Research Interests

I work on identifying gravitational wave sources which will be detected by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). For my PhD, I am using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), an optical northern-sky synoptic survey, to discover LISA gravitational wave sources long before LISA itself begins to operate. These sources are binary white dwarfs with very short orbital periods (a white dwarf is a dense Fermi-degenerate stellar remnant). There are only around a dozen such sources known with a gravitational wave strain sufficiently large for LISA to detect. So far, I have discovered several new ones, including the shortest period eclipsing binary star known, which is also the best characterized LISA gravitational wave source known.

Selected Publications

Burdge, K. B., Coughlin, M. W., Fuller, J., et al. 2019, Nature, 571, 528, "General relativistic orbital decay in a seven-minute-orbital-period eclipsing binary system"

Kupfer, T., Bauer, E. B., Burdge, K. B., et al. 2019, Astrophys. J., 878, L35, "A New Class of Large-amplitude Radial-mode Hot Subdwarf Pulsators"

Margon, B., Kupfer, T., Burdge, K., et al. 2018, Astrophys. J., 856, L2, "The Binary Dwarf Carbon Star SDSS J125017.90+252427.6"

Mail Code:	MC 103-33
Email:	kburdge@caltech.edu