Related papers: White dwarf cooling sequences and cosmochronology

We present full evolutionary calculations appropriate for the study of hydrogen-rich DA white dwarfs. This is done by evolving white dwarf progenitors from the zero age main sequence, through the core hydrogen burning phase, the helium…

We present the white dwarf sequence of the globular cluster M4, based on a 123 orbit Hubble Space Telescope exposure, with limiting magnitude V = 30, I = 28. The white dwarf luminosity function rises sharply for I >25.5, consistent with the…

Thanks to their continuous cooling and relative simplicity, white dwarf stars are routinely used to measure the ages of stellar populations. The usefulness of white dwarfs as cosmochronometers depends on the availability of accurate cooling…

The optical luminosity function is a fundamental characterization of the galaxy population. A combination of earlier redshift surveys with two new surveys allows the first accurate determination of the evolution of the luminosity function…

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…

As a result of competing physical mechanisms, the atmospheric composition of white dwarfs changes throughout their evolution, a process known as spectral evolution. Because of the ambiguity of their atmospheric compositions and the…

The inversion of the white dwarf luminosity function provides an independent way to prove the past star formation history of the Milky Way independent of any cosmological models. In Rowell & Hambly (2011), the effective volume method uses…

White dwarfs are stellar embers depleted of nuclear energy sources that cool over billions of years. These stars, which are supported by electron degeneracy pressure, reach densities of 1e7 grams per cubic centimetre in their cores. It has…

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 review empirical and theoretical findings concerning white dwarfs in Galactic globular clusters. Since their detection is a critical issue we describe in detail the various efforts to find white dwarfs in globular clusters. We then…

The continuous cooling of a white dwarf is punctuated by events that affect its cooling rate. Probably the most significant of those is the crystallization of its core, a phase transition that occurs once the C/O interior has cooled down…

Interacting binaries containing white dwarfs can lead to a variety of outcomes that range from powerful thermonuclear explosions, which are important in the chemical evolution of galaxies and as cosmological distance estimators, to strong…

We use 10 orbits of Advanced Camera for Surveys observations to reach the end of the white dwarf cooling sequence in the solar-metallicity open cluster NGC 2158. Our photometry and completeness tests show that the end falls at magnitude…

We present 594 radial velocity measurements for 71 white dwarfs obtained during our search for binary white dwarfs and not reported elsewhere. We identify three excellent candidate binaries, which require further observations to confirm our…

We investigate the luminosity and cooling of highly magnetized white dwarfs where cooling occurs by the diffusion of photons. We solve the magnetostatic equilibrium and photon diffusion equations to obtain the temperature and density…

I will start by discussing the evolutionary status of the white dwarf *progenitors*, the hot UV bright stars. Observations of UIT-selected UV bright stars in globular clusters suggest that a high percentage of them manage to evolve from the…

The ESA Gaia mission has revolutionized our understanding of the white dwarf population, delivering an unprecedented census of these nearby remnants and revealing previously unseen structures in the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram.…

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…

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…

On the basis of theoretical evolutionary expectations, we develop a Galactic model reproducing star counts and synthetic color-magnitude diagrams of field stars, which include the white dwarf (WD) population. In this way we are able to…