ELFT HÍRADÓ

[Kormányos Andor <andor.kormanyos AT ttk.elte.hu>]

ELTE TTK Fizikai Intézet / ELTE Institute of Physics


ORTVAY KOLLOKVIUM / ORTVAY COLLOQUIUM
(https://physics.elte.hu/ortvayseminar)



Thursday, 9th October  2025, 15:00h.

Pócza Jenő Lecture Hall, Physics Building 1.71

Pázmány Péter sétány 1/A, 1117 Budapest



Dorottya  Szécsi

Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland


Does "I Zwicky 18" harbor GW progenitors? The story of a dwarf galaxy and 
what I learned in the past 12 years
The metal-poor, irregular dwarf galaxy called I Zwicky 18 has been suggested 
to harbor (theorized) progenitors of Gravitational-Wave emitting mergers. The 
galaxy emits an unprecedented amount of hard ionizing radiation together with 
certain emission features in its spectrum. To explain this, a theorist like 
me has to put together a complex hypothesis based on reliable computer models 
of those stars, and compare its predictions to all available observations in 
the literature. Sounds easy, right? But what if she finds that the 
observations *themselves* actually contradict each other? Then she has no 
choice but go down the rabbit hole of learning how observational astronomers 
work, speak, and think – a scientific challenge in itself. In this talk, I 
share my curious story of the past 12 years tackling the case of I Zwicky 18, 
and my hunt for finding observational evidence for the existence of a certain 
type of GW progenitors, which have just come to an end.


Andor Kormányos

coordinator