Related papers: An ultra-massive fast-spinning white dwarf in a pe…
White dwarfs are the burnt out cores of Sun-like stars and are the final fate of 97% of all stars in our Galaxy. The internal structure and composition of white dwarfs are hidden by their high gravities, which causes all elements, apart…
We present high-quality ULTRACAM photometry of the eclipsing detached double-white dwarf binary NLTT 11748. This system consists of a carbon/oxygen white dwarf and an extremely-low mass (< 0.2 Msun) helium-core white dwarf in a 5.6 hr…
Supernova Ia are bright explosive events that can be used to estimate cosmological distances, allowing us to study the expansion of the Universe. They are understood to result from a thermonuclear detonation in a white dwarf that formed…
Today, Type Ia supernovae are essential tools for cosmology, and recognized as major contributors to the chemical evolution of galaxies. The construction of detailed supernova progenitor models, however, was so far prevented by various…
Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) can be used as the standard candlelight to determine the cosmological distances because they are thought to have a uniform fuel amount. Recent observations of several overluminous SNe Ia suggest that the white…
Pulsars are magnetized rotating compact objects. They spin down due to magnetic dipole radiation and wind emission. If photon has a nonzero mass, the spin down rate would be smaller than the zero mass case. We show that an upper limit of…
SDSS J030308.35+005444.1 is a close, detached, eclipsing white dwarf plus M dwarf binary which shows a large infrared excess which has been interpreted in terms of a circumbinary dust disk. In this paper we present optical and near-infrared…
We consider applications of general relativistic uniformly-rotating white dwarfs to several astrophysical phenomena related to the spin-up and the spin-down epochs and to delayed type Ia supernova explosions of super-Chandrasekhar white…
The existence of possible massive white dwarfs more than the Chandrasekhar limit ($1.45M_{\odot }$, in which $M_{\odot }$ is mass of the sun) is a challenging topic. In this regard and motivated by the important effect of massive graviton…
Extremely low mass white dwarfs are very rare objects likely formed in compact binary systems. We present MMT optical spectroscopy of 42 low mass white dwarf candidates serendipitously discovered in a survey for hypervelocity B-type stars.…
There is wide agreement that Type Ia supernovae (used as standard candles for cosmology) are associated with the thermonuclear explosions of white dwarf stars. The nuclear runaway that leads to the explosion could start in a white dwarf…
We have considered scenarios for the evolution of close binaries resulting in the formation of semi-detached systems in which a white dwarf can accumulate Chandrasekhar mass by accretion from a main-sequence or subgiant companion with…
Starquakes are considered for fast-rotating magnetic white dwarfs. The X-ray pulsar 1E 2259 + 586 may be such a white dwarf. It is shown that in this case starquakes may be responsible for the decrease of the mean spin-down rate which was…
Super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs are a timely topic in the last years in the scientific community due to its connection to supernovae type Ia (SN Ia). Some early studies tackled the possibility of white dwarfs surpassing the Chandrasekhar…
We present radial velocity observations of four extremely low-mass (0.2 Msol) white dwarfs. All four stars show peak-to-peak radial velocity variations of 540 - 710 km/s with 1.0 - 5.9 hr periods. The optical photometry rules out…
We examine the growing data set of binary millisecond pulsars that are thought to have a helium white dwarf companion. These systems are believed to form when a low- to intermediate-mass companion to a neutron star fills its Roche lobe…
Thermonuclear (type Ia) supernovae are explosions in accreting white dwarfs, but the exact scenario leading to these explosions is still unclear. An important step to clarify this point is to understand the behaviour of accreting white…
We report the discovery of a nearby M5.0V dwarf at 24.6 pc, SCR 1848-6855, that is orbited by an unusual companion causing an astrometric perturbation of more than 200 milli-arcseconds. This is by far the largest perturbation found to date…
In this paper we present the discovery of a highly unequal-mass eclipsing M-dwarf binary, providing a unique constraint on binary star formation theory and on evolutionary models for low-mass binary stars. The binary is discovered using…
A recent study by Yoon & Langer (2004a) indicated that the inner cores of rapidly accreting (Mdot > 10^{-7} M_sun/yr) CO white dwarfs may rotate differentially, with a shear rate near the threshold value for the onset of the dynamical shear…