Related papers: The galactic population of white dwarfs
The interpretation of microlensing results towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) still remains controversial. Whereas white dwarfs have been proposed to explain these results and, hence, to contribute significantly to the mass budget of…
While recent sky surveys have uncovered large numbers of ever fainter Milky Way satellites, their classification as star clusters, low-luminosity galaxies, or tidal overdensities remains often unclear. Likewise, their contributions to the…
(Abridged Abstract) A favored interpretation of recent microlensing measurements towards the Large Magellanic Cloud implies that a large fraction (i.e. 10--50%) of the mass of the galactic halo is composed of white dwarfs. We compare model…
We predict that there is a population of low-luminosity dwarf galaxies orbiting within the halo of the Milky Way that have surface brightnesses low enough to have escaped detection in star-count surveys. The overall count of stealth…
We present the kinematics of a sample of 398 DA white dwarfs from the SPY project (ESO SN Ia Progenitor surveY) and discuss kinematic criteria for distinguishing thin-disk, thick-disk, and halo populations. This is the largest homogeneous…
This paper reports a Galactic kinematical and dynamical analysis of 1003 main-sequence carbon stars. The sample is drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and cross-matched with Gaia DR3 to obtain 6-dimensional positions and velocities…
White dwarfs are the fossils left by the evolution of low-and intermediate-mass stars, and have very long evolutionary timescales. This allows us to use them to explore the properties of old populations, like the Galactic halo. We present a…
Halo white dwarfs can provide important information about the properties and evolution of the galactic halo. In this paper we compute, assuming a standard IMF and updated models of white dwarf cooling, the expected luminosity function, both…
After summarizing the characteristics of different types of dwarf galaxies I briefly review our current state of knowledge of dwarf galaxy evolution in the Local Group, for which we now have a fairly detailed although by no means…
The Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends to $>100$ kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kpc of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between…
Globular star clusters are among the first stellar populations to have formed in the Milky Way, and thus only a small sliver of their initial spectrum of stellar types are still burning hydrogen on the main-sequence today. Almost all of the…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud detected by the MACHO and EROS collaborations is that about one third of the halo of our own Milky Way galaxy exists in the form of objects of around…
Oxygen and carbon are important elements in stellar populations. Their behavior refers to the formation history of the stellar populations. C and O abundances would also obviously influence stellar opacities and the overall metal abundance…
We analyse the kinematics of the entire spectroscopic sample of 99 recently discovered high proper-motion white dwarfs by Oppenheimer et al. using a maximum-likelihood analysis, and discuss the claim that the high-velocity white dwarfs are…
A detailed analysis of halo white dwarf candidates is presented, which is based on model atmosphere fits to observed energy distributions built from photoelectric or photographic magnitudes. Most of the candidates identified in reduced…
We calculate the expected white dwarf luminosity functions and discovery functions in photometric passbands, if these stellar remnants provide a substantial fraction of the sought Galactic dark matter, as suggested on various observational…
Having ruled out the possibility that stellar objects are the main contributor of the dark matter embedding galaxies, microlensing experiments cannot exclude the hypothesis that a significant fraction of the Milky Way dark halo might be…
White dwarf stars constitute the final evolutionary stage for more than 95 per cent of all stars. The Galactic population of white dwarfs conveys a wealth of information about several fundamental issues and are of vital importance to study…
Thick disks appear to be common in external large spiral galaxies and our own Milky Way also hosts one. The existence of a thick disk is possibly directly linked to the formation history of the host galaxy and if its properties is known it…
We present kinematics of a sample of 107 DA white dwarfs from the SPY project and discuss kinematic criteria for a distinction of thin disk, thick disk, and halo populations. This is the first homogeneous sample of white dwarfs for which 3D…