English

Significantly super-Chandrasekhar limiting mass white dwarfs and their consequences

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2016-11-02 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

Since 2012, we have initiated a new idea showing that the mass of highly magnetized or modified Einstein's gravity induced white dwarfs could be significantly super-Chandrasekhar with a different mass-limit. This discovery has several important consequences, including explanation of peculiar, over-luminous type Ia supernovae, soft gamma-ray repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars without invoking extraordinarily strong, yet unobserved, magnetic fields. It further argues for a possible second standard candle. Based on simpler calculations, these white dwarfs are also shown to be much less luminous than their standard counter-parts (of low magnetic fields). This discovery altogether initiates a new field of research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1611.00133,
  title  = {Significantly super-Chandrasekhar limiting mass white dwarfs and their consequences},
  author = {Banibrata Mukhopadhyay and Upasana Das and A. R. Rao and Sathyawageeswar Subramanian and Mukul Bhattacharya and Subroto Mukerjee and Tanayveer Singh Bhatia and Jagannath Sutradhar},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1611.00133},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages including 2 figures; to appear in proceedings of The 20th European Workshop on White Dwarfs (EuroWD16)