Related papers: Two delays in white dwarf evolution revealed by Ga…
Axions are the natural consequence of the introduction of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry to solve the strong CP problem. All the efforts to detect such elusive particles have failed up to now. Nevertheless, it has been recently shown that the…
The merger of two white dwarfs may be preceded by the ejection of some mass in "tidal tails", creating a circumstellar medium around the system. We consider the variety of observational signatures from this material, which depend on the lag…
Ultra-massive white dwarfs are relevant for their role as type Ia Supernova progenitors, the occurrence of physical processes in the asymptotic giant-branch phase, the existence of high-field magnetic white dwarfs, and the occurrence of…
This review highlights the role of the Gaia space mission in transforming white dwarf research. These stellar remnants constitute 5-7% of the local stellar population in volume, yet before Gaia the lack of trigonometric parallaxes hindered…
White dwarfs are the remnants of low and intermediate mass stars. Because of electron degeneracy, their evolution is just a simple gravothermal process of cooling. Recently, thanks to Gaia data, it has been possible to construct the…
Discovery and characterisation of black holes (BHs), neutron stars (NSs), and white dwarfs (WDs) with detached luminous companions (LCs) in wide orbits are exciting because they are important test beds for dark remnant (DR) formation…
We report on a comparison of spectroscopic analyses for hydrogen (DA) and helium atmosphere (DB) white dwarfs with Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2) parallaxes and photometry. We assume a reddening law and a mass-radius relation to connect the…
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…
Cooling ages of white dwarfs are routinely determined by mapping effective temperatures and masses to ages using evolutionary models. Typically, the reported uncertainties on cooling ages only consider the error propagation of the…
We have exploited Gaia Data Release 2 to study white dwarf members of the Praesepe star cluster. We recovered eleven known white dwarf members (all DA spectral type) plus a new cluster WD never identified before. Two of the eleven known DA…
We present a brief summary of the Single Degenerate Scenario for the progenitors of Type Ia Supernovae in which it is assumed that a low mass carbon-oxygen white dwarf is growing in mass as a result of accretion from a secondary star in a…
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…
The surface abundances of extreme helium (EHe) and R Coronae Borealis (RCB) stars are discussed in terms of the merger of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf with a helium white dwarf. The model is expressed as a linear mixture of the individual…
High-field magnetic white dwarfs have been long suspected to be the result of stellar mergers. However, the nature of the coalescing stars and the precise mechanism that produces the magnetic field are still unknown. Here we show that the…
We present a catalogue of 73,221 white dwarf candidates extracted from the astrometric and photometric data of the recently published Gaia DR2 catalogue. White dwarfs were selected from the Gaia Hertzsprung-Russell diagram with the aid of…
I will start by discussing the evolutionary status of the white dwarf *progenitors*, the hot UV bright stars. Observations of UIT-selected UV bright stars in globular clusters suggest that a high percentage of them manage to evolve from the…
Gaia provided the largest-ever catalogue of white dwarf stars. We use this catalogue, along with the third public data release of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), to identify new eclipsing white dwarf binaries. Our method exploits light…
The shape of the luminosity function of white dwarfs (WDLF) is sensitive to the characteristic cooling time and, therefore, it can be used to test the existence of additional sources or sinks of energy such as those predicted by alternative…
The explosion of a white dwarf of mass 1.36 M$_\odot$ has been simulated in three dimensions with the aid of a SPH code. The explosion follows the delayed detonation paradigma. In this case the deflagration-detonation transition is induced…
There are currently two open questions in white dwarf physics: why are massive dwarfs observed less often in astronomical surveys, and why have not any super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs been found despite the discovery of more than a dozen…