Related papers: Core crystallization and pile-up in the cooling se…
We discuss the impact of residual nuclear burning in the cooling sequences of hydrogen-rich DA white dwarfs with very low metallicity progenitors ($Z=0.0001$). These cooling sequences are appropriate for the study of very old stellar…
White dwarfs are the end state of most stars, including the Sun, after they exhaust their nuclear fuel. Between 1/4 and 1/2 of white dwarfs have elements heavier than helium in their atmospheres, even though these elements should rapidly…
The present work is designed to explore the evolutionary and pulsational properties of low-mass white dwarfs with carbon/oxygen cores. In particular, we follow the evolution of a 0.33 Msun white dwarf remnant in a self-consistent way with…
White dwarfs accreting from helium stars can stably burn at the accreted rate and avoid the challenge of mass loss associated with unstable Helium burning that is a concern for many Type Ia supernovae scenarios. We study binaries with…
Recent measurements made by Hipparcos (Provencal et al. 1998) present observational evidence supporting the existence of some white dwarf (WD) stars with iron - rich, core composition. In this connection, the present paper is aimed at…
We present a detailed calculation of model atmospheres for DA white dwarfs. Our atmosphere code solves the atmosphere structure in local thermodynamic equilibrium with a standard partial linearization technique, which takes into account the…
Carbon stars (with C/O> 1) were long assumed to all be giants, because only AGB stars dredge up significant carbon into their atmospheres. The case is nearly iron-clad now that the formerly mysterious dwarf carbon (dC) stars are actually…
We analysed the cooling of white dwarfs in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae using deep observations from the Hubble Space Telescope that resolve the white dwarf cooling sequence to late enough cooling times that the white dwarf core has…
Two well-studied white dwarfs with helium-dominated atmospheres (DBs) each possess less hydrogen than carried by a single average-mass comet. Plausibly, the wind rates from these stars are low enough that most accreted hydrogen remains with…
Breathing pulses are mixing episodes that could develop during the core-helium burning phase of low- and intermediate-mass stars. The occurrence of breathing pulses is expected to bear consequences on the formation and evolution of white…
The atmospheres of a large proportion of white dwarf stars are polluted by heavy elements that are expected to sink out of visible layers on short timescales. This has been interpreted as a signature of ongoing accretion of debris from…
The evolution of white dwarfs is a simple gravothermal process. This means that their luminosity function, i.e. the number of white dwarfs per unit bolometric magnitude and unit volume as a function of bolometric magnitude, is a…
Quantum corrections can be important for diffusion and the melting temperature of dense plasmas in compact astrophysical objects, particulary white dwarfs and neutron stars. Typically ions in these systems are modeled classically, but…
Infrared studies have revealed debris likely related to planet formation in orbit around ~30% of youthful, intermediate mass, main sequence stars. We present evidence, based on atmospheric pollution by various elements heavier than helium,…
Ultramassive white dwarfs with masses $M\gtrsim 1.1\,{\rm M}_\odot$ probe extreme physics near the Chandrasekhar limit. Despite the rapid increase in observations, it is still unclear how many harbour carbon-oxygen (CO) versus oxygen-neon…
We enhance the treatment of crystallization for models of white dwarfs (WDs) in the stellar evolution software MESA by implementing carbon-oxygen (C/O) phase separation. The phase separation process during crystallization leads to transport…
Approximately $0.2 \pm 0.2$ of white dwarfs (WDs) show signs of pollution by metals, which is likely due to the accretion of tidally disrupted planetary material. Models invoking planet-planet interactions after WD formation generally…
We examine the emergent fluxes from helium-core white dwarfs following their evolution from the end of pre-white dwarf stages down to advanced cooling stages. For this purpose, we include a detailed treatment of the physics of the…
We present three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations of detonations in $1.0 \mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ white dwarfs that have undergone $^{22} \mathrm{Ne}$ distillation during crystallisation. These simulations, conducted with the moving-mesh…
Gravitational wave emission can lead to the coalescence of close pairs of compact objects orbiting each other. For the case of neutron stars such mergers may yield masses above the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, leading to the formation…