Little is known about the incidence of magnetic fields among the coolest white dwarfs. Their spectra usually do not exhibit any absorption lines as the bound-bound opacities of hydrogen and helium are vanishingly small. Probing these stars for the presence of magnetic fields is therefore extremely challenging. However, external pollution of a cool white dwarf by, e.g., planetary debris, leads to the appearance of metal lines in its spectral energy distribution. These lines provide a unique tool to identify and measure magnetism in the coolest and oldest white dwarfs in the Galaxy. We report the identification of 7 strongly metal polluted, cool (T_eff < 8000 K) white dwarfs with magnetic field strengths ranging from 1.9 to 9.6 MG. An analysis of our larger magnitude-limited sample of cool DZ yields a lower limit on the magnetic incidence of 13+/-4 percent, noticeably much higher than among hot DA white dwarfs.
@article{arxiv.1503.03866,
title = {The incidence of magnetic fields in cool DZ white dwarfs},
author = {Mark Hollands and Boris Gaensicke and Detlev Koester},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1503.03866},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
11 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS