Alumna Ilaria Caiazzo led a team based at Caltech and elsewhere to discover the smallest and therefore most massive white dwarf ever found. It is within about one percent of the maximum mass that a white dwarf can be, the Chandrasekhar mass. It rotates every seven minutes and harbours a magnetic field more than a billion times stronger than Earth’s [cite]10.1038/s41586-021-03615-y[/cite].