Related papers: He white dwarfs with large H contamination: Convec…
A significant fraction of white dwarfs show metal lines indicative of pollution with planetary material but the accretion process remains poorly understood. The main aim of this paper is to produce a road-map illustrating several potential…
It is predicted that orbital decay by gravitational-wave radiation and tidal interaction will cause some close-binary stars to merge within a Hubble time. The merger of a helium-core white dwarf with a main-sequence star can produce a red…
Hydrogen atmosphere white dwarfs with metal lines, so-called DAZs, show evidence for ongoing accretion of material onto their surfaces. Some DAZs are known to have unresolved M dwarf companions, which could account for the observed…
Extrapolating from the solar system's asteroid belt, we propose that externally-contaminated white dwarfs without an infrared excess may be experiencing continuous accretion of gas-phase material that ultimately is derived from the tidal…
A large fraction of white dwarf stars shows photospheric chemical composition polluted by heavy elements accreted from a debris disk. Such debris disks result from the tidal disruption of rocky planetesimals which had survived to whole…
The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is still a subject of debate. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~M_{sun} have been ruled out as…
Classical DQ stars are white dwarfs whose atmospheres contain detectable traces of carbon brought up to the surface by a convective dredge-up process. Intriguingly, unlike other white dwarf spectral classes, DQ stars virtually never show…
Recent computations of the interior composition of ultra-massive white dwarfs (WD) have suggested that some white dwarfs could be composed of neon (Ne)-dominated cores. This result is at variance with our previous understanding of the…
Understanding the explosion mechanism of type Ia supernova is among the most challenging issues in astrophysics. Accretion of matter on a carbon-oxygen white dwarf from a companion star is one of the most important keys in this regard. Our…
Pulsating white dwarfs provide constraints to the evolution of progenitor stars. We revise He-burning stellar models, with particular attention to core convection and to its connection with the nuclear reactions powering energy generation…
Diffusion of elements in the atmosphere and envelope of a star can drastically alter its surface composition, leading to extreme chemical peculiarities. We consider the case of hot subdwarfs, where surface helium abundances range from…
With the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescope, we have detected molecular hydrogen in the atmospheres of three white dwarfs with effective temperatures below 14,000 K, G29-38, GD 133 and GD 31. This discovery…
White dwarfs that have accreted rocky planetary bodies provide unique insights regarding the bulk composition of exoplanetary material. The analysis presented here uses observed white dwarf atmospheric abundances to constrain both where in…
The atmospheres of cool, helium-rich white dwarfs constitute an exotic and poorly explored physical regime of stellar atmospheres. Under physical conditions where the temperature varies from $\rm 1000K$ to $\rm 10000K$, the density can…
We investigate the dissociation equilibrium of $\rm H_2$ in very cool, helium-rich white dwarf atmospheres. We present the solution of the non-ideal chemical equilibrium for the dissociation of molecular hydrogen in a medium of dense…
The present work is designed to explore the evolution of helium-core white dwarf (HeWD) stars for the case of metallicities much lower than the solar one (Z=0.001 and Z=0.0002). Evolution is followed in a self-consistent way with the…
The recent plethora of sky surveys, especially the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, have discovered many low-mass (M < 0.45 Msun) white dwarfs that should have cores made of nearly pure helium. These WDs come in two varieties; those with masses…
Based mostly on stellar models which do not include rotation, CO white dwarfs which accrete helium at rates of about $\sim 10^{-8}~\mathrm{M}_\odot/\mathrm{yr}$ have been put forward as candidate progenitors for a number of transient…
The diffusion of elements is a key process in understanding the unusual surface composition of white dwarfs stars and their spectral evolution. The diffusion coefficients of Paquette et al. (1986) have been widely used to model diffusion in…
Microlensing events observed in the line of sight toward the LMC indicate that a significant fraction of the mass of the dark halo of the Galaxy is probably composed of white dwarfs. In addition, white dwarf sequences have now be observed…