Related papers: Untangling the White Dwarf Luminosity Functions
After summarizing the characteristics of different types of dwarf galaxies I briefly review our current state of knowledge of dwarf galaxy evolution in the Local Group, for which we now have a fairly detailed although by no means…
The luminosity functions of galaxies and quasars provide invaluable information about galaxy and quasar formation. Estimating the luminosity function from magnitude limited samples is relatively straightforward, provided that the distances…
The spectral flux density of stars can indicate their atmospheric physical properties. A detector can obtain any band flux density at the design stage. However, the band flux density is confirmed and fixed in the process of operation…
The local space density of galaxies as a function of their basic structural parameters --like luminosity, surface brightness and scalesize-- is still poorly known. Our poor knowledge is mainly the result of strong selection biases against…
We introduce a method to infer the vertical distribution of stars in the Milky Way using a Poisson likelihood function, with a view to applying our method to the Gaia catalogue. We show how to account for the sample selection function and…
Many astronomical surveys are limited by the brightness of the sources, and gravitational-wave searches are no exception. The detectability of gravitational waves from merging binaries is affected by the mass and spin of the constituent…
The total number and luminosity function of the population of dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way (MW) provide important constraints on the nature of the dark matter and on the astrophysics of galaxy formation at low masses. However, only a…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys have the potential to directly probe mass density fluctuation in the universe. Recent studies have shown that it is possible to model the statistics of the convergence field at small angular scales by…
Almost every known planet host will evolve into a white dwarf, and the surviving planetary material will continue to orbit this stellar remnant. Asteroids perturbed onto star-grazing orbits will become disrupted, forming an accretion disk…
We show that binned differential luminosity functions constructed using the 1/Va method have a significant systematic error for objects close to their parent sample's flux limit(s). This is particularly noticeable when luminosity functions…
Microlensing of distant stars in the Milky Way by the nearby high proper motion stars offers a direct way to precisely measure the masses of single lower main sequence stars and brown dwarfs.
We place observational constraints on a recently proposed Galactic population, dubbed the shroud (Gyuk & Gates 1999, Gates & Gyuk 2001). The shroud would be a very thick Galactic disk of low luminosity objects, most likely old white dwarfs,…
Deriving the 3-dimensional volume density distribution from a 2-dimensional light distribution of a system yields generally non-unique results. The case for nearby dust-free systems is studied, taking into account the extra constraints from…
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…
The distribution of stellar masses that form in one star-formation event in a given volume of space is called the initial mass function (IMF). The IMF has been estimated from low-mass brown dwarfs to very massive stars. Combining IMF…
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…
Strong gravitational lensing provides a powerful tool to directly infer the dark matter (DM) subhalo mass function (SHMF) in lens galaxies. However, comparing observationally inferred SHMFs to theoretical predictions remains challenging, as…
In this paper, we show that Minkowski Functionals (MFs) of weak gravitational lensing (WL) convergence maps contain significant non-Gaussian, cosmology-dependent information. To do this, we use a large suite of cosmological ray-tracing…
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…
Two new luminosity functions of galaxies can be built starting from three and four parameter generalized gamma distributions. In the astrophysical conversion, the number of parameters increases by one, due to the addition of the overall…