I am interested in a broad variety of astrophysical phenomena, especially transient ones (...explosions!).  Over the years, I have studied different objects including active galactic nuclei and supernovae, but I have mostly focused my attention  on interacting binary stars that host a massive white dwarf. 

This is a link to my professional articles  

If you are not an astrophysicist (or not yet!), I will  describe here the topics of my work in a few  words. White dwarfs are "dead stars", the end product of the evolution of most stars (those with mass lower than approximately 8 solar masses). They are cores of stars that  have undergone a series of nuclear burnings. Unable to ignite new burnings, they lose the outer layers, often in the wind of a "planetary nebula". Most white dwarfs are composed of carbon and oxygen, although also white dwarfs composed of helium, and more rarely of oxygen and neon,  exist. The more massive a white dwarf is, the more compact and dense it is. This is because in a white dwarf there are no "atoms", but only ions, and electrons move freely like in a metal. It is a condition of matter, called "electron degenerate",  that makes white dwarfs very dense,  close to the solar mass, but with radii of only tens of thousands of km (by comparison, the Sun radius is almost 700,000 km). They cool, still emitting light as they become colder, and "crystallize".  

      While a total explosion of a white dwarf (a thermonuclear supernova) is rare, thermonuclear burning of hydrogen in a shell at the bottom of the accreted envelope  leads to the more common nova phenomenon, the type of explosion that I most often study. These outbursts are due to the "CNO cycle", which easily becomes explosive, inflating the accreted envelope and later giving rise to a superwind at velocity of thousands km/s, enriching the interstellar medium of several elements and isotopes. In these binaries,  there are also smaller flares - often due to instabilities of an accretion disk that forms from the material spiralling onto the white dwarf. 

 Usually, white dwarfs  can only innescate nuclear reactions in their interior in a "pycnonuclear" regime that is only dependent on the density of the matter, not its temperature. A type Ia, or "thermonuclear"  supernova is triggered by burning of  carbon 12, which occurs at such high density, that it is very, very close to the "Chandrasekhar"  limit at which a white dwarf can only collapse into an even denser form of matter, called a neutron star (the radius then is of only few km!). We think that this type of supernova happens only if there is unusually high mass accretion from a companion, or two white dwarfs merge. However, there are also investigations to examine how this may happen without involving two stars, for example ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015MNRAS.448.2100C/abstract