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From data collection to photometric fitting and analysis of white dwarfs to generating a white dwarf luminosity function requires numerous Astrophysical, Mathematical and Computational domain knowledge. The steep learning curve makes it…
We have conducted a survey of 61 southern white dwarfs searching for magnetic fields using Zeeman spectropolarimetry. Our objective is to obtain a magnetic field distribution for these objects and, in particular, to find white dwarfs with…
White dwarf cooling sequences provides a useful indicator of the evolutionary time scales involved in the chronometry and star formation history of the galactic disk and, for this reason, the luminosity function of white dwarfs has become a…
About 20% of the white dwarfs possess a magnetic field that may be detected by the splitting and/or polarization of their spectral lines. As they cool, the effective temperatures of the white dwarfs becomes so low that no spectral lines can…
White dwarfs are excellent research laboratories as they reach temperatures, pressures, and magnetic fields that are unattainable on Earth. To better understand how these three physical parameters interact with each other and with other…
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…
The vast majority of stars that populate the Universe will end their evolution as white-dwarf stars. Applications of white dwarfs include cosmochronology, evolution of planetary systems, and also as laboratories to study non-standard…
White dwarfs represent the most common end stage of stellar evolution and are important for a range of astrophysical questions. The high-resolution ultraviolet spectroscopic capability of the Habitable World Observatory (HWO) offers a…
The evolution of white dwarfs is a simple gravothermal process. This process can be tested in two ways, through the luminosity function of these stars and through the secular variation of the period of pulsation of those stars that are…
The spectroscopic features of white dwarfs are formed in the thin upper layer of their stellar photosphere. These features carry information about the white dwarf's surface temperature, surface gravity, and chemical composition (hereafter…
Aims. We use the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey to derive the luminosity function (LF) of the first-ranked (brightest) group/cluster galaxies, the LF of second-ranked, satellite and isolated galaxies, and the LF of groups of galaxies. Methods.…
Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) can self-annihilate, thus providing us with a way to indirectly detect dark matter (DM). Dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies are excellent places to search for annihilation signals because they are…
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,…
We describe a new survey for cool white dwarfs that supplements Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometry with USNO proper motions and follow-up spectroscopy. To date we have discovered and spectroscopically confirmed 80 new moderate temperature…
We have carried out a re-analysis of polarimetric data of central stars of planetary nebulae, hot subdwarfs, and white dwarfs taken with FORS1 (FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph) on the VLT (Very Large Telescope), and added a…
We demonstrate that plasmon neutrinos are the dominant form of energy loss in model white dwarf stars down to T_eff ~ 25,000 K, depending on the stellar mass. The lower end of this range overlaps the observed temperatures for the V777 Her…
In our galaxy, the white dwarfs (WDs) will inevitably capture the dark matter (DM) particles streaming through them, if there exist interactions between DM particles and nuclei/electrons. At the same time, these DM particles can also be…
Luminosity Functions have been obtained for very faint dwarf galaxies in the cores of four rich clusters of galaxies (Abell 2052, 2107, 2199 and 2666). It is found that the luminosity function of dwarf galaxies rises very steeply in these…
We study ultralight scalar fields with quadratic couplings to Standard-Model fermions and derive strong constraints from white-dwarf mass-radius data. Such couplings source scalar profiles inside compact stars, shift fermion masses, and can…
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…