Seminaire Lagrange -- Dorottya Szécsi (Nicolaus Copernicus University - Toruń, Poland) -- Does I Zwicky 18 harbor GW progenitors? The story of a dwarf galaxy and what I learned in the past 12 years

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 chemically-homogeneously evolving stars, one of the 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 their 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 mad hunt for finding observational evidence for the existence of chem.homogeneous GW progenitors, which may finally come to an end this year.