Astronomy Tea Talk

We are in the golden age of stellar astronomy. The Gaia mission provides distances and/or proper motions for a billion galactic objects. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has surveyed the entire Northern sky for over four years, collecting time-domain photometry for over a billion Galactic sources. These datasets, when crossmatched with X-ray catalogs, have led to the discovery of a wide range of accreting compact objects. I will discuss my findings after crossmatching ZTF with the Swift, Chandra, XMM, and SRG/eROSITA eFEDS point sources catalogs, in addition to the work I have done in reviving the ROSAT 2RXS catalog. I will describe the zoo of accreting white dwarfs that has emerged, highlighting the large population of highly magnetic accreting white dwarfs that have gone undiscovered in past surveys. The origin of magnetic fields hundreds of millions of times that of the Sun in these white dwarfs is an unsolved problem. The discovery of new systems opens up new perspectives into binary star evolution and accretion astrophysics that will become further elucidated in the era of SRG/eROSITA.