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Eva Stafne
November 25, 2025

Undergraduate researcher Eva Stafne publishes new paper on how Einstein’s theory might help planets around white dwarfs stay habitable

Written By: Caitlin Scott

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Undergraduate Mechanical and International Engineering student Eva Stafne is studying abroad in Norway this fall, while also publishing a first-authored paper in The Astrophysical Journal exploring how Einstein’s theory of general relativity could help preserve life-friendly conditions on planets orbiting white dwarfs. She shared with us on how she does it all.

It’s very impressive for an undergraduate to already be publishing research papers! How did you do it while also studying abroad?

I started doing research right away as a freshman through the Undergraduate Research Scholars (URS) program, which I think is the main reason I was able to publish a paper so early. I’ve been a part of Professor Juliette Becker’s research group since then, and now work within the new Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR).

I knew I wanted to study abroad, and I chose Norway because of its great technical university (NTNU) as well as my heritage being mostly Norwegian. It’s been a very busy but exciting semester! I finished up most of this research project last spring and spent the summer presenting at conferences (like ERESX at Princeton) and starting to write my paper. I was surprised by the amount of time the review process took, though I was lucky enough to have very few critiques and was actually able to publish fairly quickly.

One of the big reasons I was able to write and publish a first-authored paper while studying abroad is the fact that most European universities base your grades on only a final exam or project. This means my classes have had very little homework, and no graded assignments during the semester. Also, UW makes study abroad classes transfer as pass/fail which helps relieve some of the major stresses of having to get a perfect grade. I have used most of my extra free time to explore Norway, but was also able to dedicate a lot of time to finalize my paper and go through the submission process.

During my time at Madison, I try to spend as much time as I can working on research since it is exciting and I am able to do that because of scholarships like the NASA WSGC Undergraduate Research Grant and the UW-Madison Sophomore Research Fellowship.

Is this an ongoing research interest of yours? Do you plan to continue down this line of inquiry?

My current research is in theoretical astrophysics, where I predict which planets outside of our solar system could host life. I’m essentially predicting the types of systems/planets aliens could inhabit. I’ve always been fascinated by the question “are we alone?” By using simulations and mathematical models, I study the dynamics of what makes planets habitable. This paper shows that general relativity can create habitable worlds in white dwarf systems, when it was previously thought that these planets would be uninhabitable. By doing this I would like to prioritize the most likely candidates to visualize with current technology like JWST.

This may seem like a weird direction of research since I am still pursuing a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (with a certificate in International Engineering), but my long-term goals are to use both my skills in engineering and astrophysics to discover other life in the universe. I think it’s important that I understand both fields, as one of the biggest challenges to space exploration is clear communication between natural scientists and engineers. My hope is to bridge that gap to advance technological design enough to see other worlds and have a better understanding of our own world, too.

Anything else you’d like to share

I like to create YouTube videos to share my research projects with the broader non-scientific community. The video I made for this paper is linked here.

Also I wanted to give Prof. Juliette Becker a shoutout because of how amazing of a mentor she has been! She answers all of my weird questions and has given up a lot of time to help me debug my code. We were recently interviewed for an article in New Scientist.

Top image: Eva Stafne presenting on this project at the UW Undergraduate Symposium in spring 2025.

Habitability of Multi-Planet White Dwarf Systems