Related papers: Axions and White Dwarfs
In the single degenerate scenario for the progenitors of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia), a white dwarf rapidly accretes hydrogen- or helium-rich material from its companion star, and appears as a supersoft X-ray source. This picture has been…
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…
During the final evolution of most stars, they shed their outer skin and expose their core of the hot ashes of nuclear burning. As these hot and very dense cores cool into white dwarf stars, they go through episodes of multiperiodic,…
The conversion of neutron matter into strange matter in a neutron star occurs through the non-leptonic weak-interaction process. We study the energy loss of the neutron star by the emission of axions in that process. Owing to that process,…
The recently discovered brown dwarf WISE 0855 presents our first opportunity to directly study an object outside the Solar System that is nearly as cold as our own gas giant planets. However the traditional methodology for characterizing…
White dwarfs are the remnants of low and intermediate mass stars. Because of electron degeneracy, their evolution is just a simple gravothermal process of cooling. Recently, thanks to Gaia data, it has been possible to construct the…
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…
Early data taken during commissioning of the SDSS have resulted in the discovery of a very cool white dwarf. It appears to have stronger collision induced absorption from molecular hydrogen than any other known white dwarf, suggesting it…
We suggest that Jovian planets will survive the late stages of stellar evolution, and that white dwarfs will retain planetary systems in wide orbits (>5AU). Utilising evolutionary models for Jovian planets, we show that infra-red imaging…
Dwarf galaxies are ideal laboratories to test dark matter models and alternative theories because their dynamical mass (from observed kinematics) largely outweighs their baryonic mass (from gas and stars). In most star-forming dwarfs, cold…
The magnetic fields of white dwarfs distort their shape generating an anisotropic moment of inertia. A magnetized white dwarf which rotates obliquely relative to the symmetry axis has a mass quadrupole moment which varies in time, so it…
We present new spectroscopic and photometric measurements of the white dwarfs LHS 3250 and WD 0346+246. Along with F351-50, these white dwarfs are the coolest ones known, all with effective temperatures below 4000 K. Their membership in the…
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…
Steadily accreting white dwarfs (WDs) are efficient sources of ionization and thus, are able to create extended ionized nebulae in their vicinity. These nebulae represent ideal tools for the detection of accreting WDs, given that in most…
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…
White dwarf stars have been used as flux standards for decades, thanks to their staid simplicity. We have empirically tested their photometric stability by analyzing the light curves of 398 high-probability candidates and spectroscopically…
White dwarf stars are the most common end point of stellar evolution. Of special interest are the ultramassive white dwarfs, as they are related to type Ia Supernovae explosions, merger events, and Fast Radio Bursts. Ultramassive white…
White dwarfs represent the endpoint of stellar evolution for stars with initial masses between approximately 0.07 msun and 8-10 msun, where msun is the mass of the Sun (more massive stars end their life as either black holes or neutron…
We have searched for evidence for dust and gas disks at a sample of hot DA white dwarfs 20 000K < Teff < 50 000K, without success. Although their atmospheres are polluted with heavy elements, we cannot yet convincingly and conclusively show…
New, high resolution, large-scale, cosmological hydrodynamic galaxy formation simulations of a standard cold dark matter model (with a cosmological constant) are utilized to predict the distribution of baryons at the present and at moderate…