Related papers: The white dwarf population within 40 pc of the Sun
We present medium resolution spectroscopy and multi-epoch VRI photometry for 21 new nearby (< 50 pc) white dwarf systems brighter than V ~ 17. Of the new systems, ten are DA (including a wide double degenerate system with two DA…
We present the techniques and early results of our program to measure the luminosity function for White Dwarfs in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey. Our survey covers over three quarters of the sky to a mean depth of I~19.2, and finds ~9,500…
Many stars evolve into magnetic white dwarfs, and observations may help to understand when the magnetic field appears at the stellar surface, if and how it evolves during the cooling phase, and what are the mechanisms that generate it.…
We have recently extended our ongoing survey of the local white dwarf population, effectively doubling the sample volume. Based upon the latest distance determinations, Holberg et al. (2016) estimated the present 20 pc and 25 pc samples…
Using a new grid of models of cooling white dwarfs, we calculate isochrones and luminosity functions in the Johnson-Kron/Cousins and HST filter sets for systems containing old white dwarfs. These new models incorporate a non-grey atmosphere…
I explore the current ability of both white dwarf cooling theory and main sequence stellar evolution theory to accurately determine stellar population ages by comparing ages derived using both techniques for open clusters ranging from 0.1…
Positional, structural and dynamical parameters for all dwarf galaxies in and around the Local Group are presented, and various aspects of our observational understanding of this volume-limited sample are discussed. Over 100 nearby galaxies…
Recent observations suggest the existence of a white dwarf population in the Galactic halo, while others suggest that deuterium has been astrated in systems at high redshift and low metallicity. We propose that these observations could be…
Synthesis models predict the integrated properties of stellar populations. Several problems exist in this field, mostly related to the fact that integrated properties are distributed. To date, this aspect has been either ignored (as in…
We analyze the volume-limited nearly complete 100 pc sample of 95 halo white dwarf candidates identified by the second data release of Gaia. Based on a detailed population synthesis model, we apply a method that relies on Gaia astrometry…
The SDSS Data Release 1 includes 1833 DA white dwarfs (WDs) and forms the largest homogeneous sample of WDs. This sample provides the best opportunity to study the statistical properties of WDs. We adopt a recently established theoretical…
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 describe a new multi-colour proper motion survey for cool white dwarfs (CWDs). The observational database consists of ~300 digitally scanned Schmidt plates in ESO/SERC field 287. The entire survey procedure, from the raw Schmidt plate…
We perform an analysis of the single white dwarf and the double degenerate binary populations in the solar neighbourhood following a population synthesis approach to investigate the effects of unresolved double degenerates in the white…
Since the Gaia data release 2, several works were published describing a bifurcation in the observed white dwarf colour$-$magnitude diagram for $\mbox{$G_{\mathrm{BP}}$}-\mbox{$G_{\mathrm{RP}}$} > 0$. Some possible explanations in the…
The most recent version of the Catalog of Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs lists 2249 white dwarf stars. Among these stars are 118 white dwarfs that have either reliable trigonometric parallaxes or color-based distance moduli which…
At ~50 Mpc, the Hydra I cluster of galaxies is among the closest cluster in the z=0 Universe, and an ideal environment to study dwarf galaxy properties in a cluster environment. We exploit deep imaging data of the Hydra I cluster to…
Accreting white dwarfs (WDs) with non-degenerate companions are expected to emit in soft X-rays and the UV, if accreted H-rich material burns stably. They are an important component of the unresolved emission of elliptical galaxies, and…
NGC 6791 is a well-studied, metal-rich open cluster that is so close to us that can be imaged down to luminosities fainter than that of the termination of its white dwarf cooling sequence, thus allowing for an in-depth study of its white…
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…