Related papers: The Future Evolution of White Dwarf Stars Through …
Hot white dwarf stars are the ideal probe for a relationship between the fine-structure constant and strong gravitational fields, providing us with an opportunity for a direct observational test. We study a sample of hot white dwarf stars,…
The shape of the luminosity function of white dwarfs (WDLF) is sensitive to the characteristic cooling time and, therefore, it can be used to test the existence of additional sources or sinks of energy such as those predicted by alternative…
White dwarf stars are the most common endpoint of stellar evolution. Therefore, these old, numerous and compact objects provide valuable information on the late stages of stellar evolution, the physics of dense plasma and the structure and…
Axions are the natural consequence of the introduction of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry to solve the strong CP problem. All the efforts to detect such elusive particles have failed up to now. Nevertheless, it has been recently shown that the…
Rotation and magnetism are increasingly recognized as important phenomena in stellar evolution. Surface magnetic fields from a few to $20{,}000\,$G have been observed and models have suggested that magnetohydrodynamic transport of angular…
Modified gravity theories can introduce modifications to the Poisson equation in the Newtonian limit. As a result, we expect to see interesting features of these modifications inside stellar objects. White dwarf stars are one of the most…
White dwarfs are the dense, burnt-out remnants of the vast majority of stars, condemned to cool over billions of years as they steadily radiate away their residual thermal energy. To first order, their atmosphere is expected to be made…
Recent measurements made by Hipparcos (Provencal et al. 1998) present observational evidence supporting the existence of some white dwarf (WD) stars with iron - rich, core composition. In this connection, the present paper is aimed at…
We use the results of realistic N-body simulations to investigate the appearance of the white dwarf population in dense star clusters. We show that the presence of a substantial binary population in a star cluster, and the interaction of…
We make use of a previous well tested Galactic model, but describing the observational behavior of the various stellar components in terms of suitable assumptions on their evolutionary status. In this way we are able to predict the expected…
Testing the constancy of the gravitational constant G has been a longstanding fundamental question in natural science. As first suggested by Jofr\'{e}, Reisenegger and Fern\'{a}ndez [1], Dirac's hypothesis of a decreasing gravitational…
White dwarfs and neutron stars are stellar objects with masses comparable to that of our sun. However, as the endpoint stages of stellar evolution, these objects do not sustain any thermonuclear burning and therefore can no longer support…
Most of low- and intermediate-mass stars that populate the Universe will end their lives as white dwarf stars. These ancient stellar remnants have encrypted inside a precious record of the evolutionary history of the progenitor stars,…
White dwarfs are almost completely degenerate objects that cannot obtain energy from thermonuclear sources, so their evolution is just a gravothermal cooling process. Recent improvements in the accuracy and precision of the luminosity…
I discuss and consider the status of observational determinations of the rotation velocities of white dwarf stars via asteroseismology and spectroscopy. While these observations have important implications on our understanding of the…
Stability of the r-modes in rapidly rotating white dwarf stars is investigated. Improved estimates of the growth times of the gravitational-radiation driven instability in the r-modes of the observed DQ Her objects are found to be longer…
The mass-radius relation of white dwarfs is largely determined by the equation of state of degenerate electrons, which causes the stellar radius to decrease as mass increases. Here we observationally measure this relation using the…
We use the most recent, complete and independent measurements of masses and radii of white dwarfs in binaries to bound the class of non-trivial modified gravity theories, viable after GW170817/GRB170817, using its effect on the mass-radius…
Recently, white dwarf stars have found a new use in the fundamental physics community. Many prospective theories of the fundamental interactions of Nature allow traditional constants, like the fine structure constant $\alpha$, to vary in…
In the course of their evolution, white-dwarf stars go through at least one phase of variability in which the global pulsations they undergo allow astronomers to peer into their interiors, this way making possible to shed light on their…