Related papers: White Dwarfs as Advanced Physics Laboratories. The…
White dwarfs, the final evolutionary stage of the vast majority of stars, serve as critical tools for cosmochronology, studies of planetary system evolution, and laboratories for non-standard physics, including exotic cooling channels and…
Motivated by the possibility that the fundamental ``constants'' of nature could vary with time, this paper considers the long term evolution of white dwarf stars under the combined action of proton decay and variations in the gravitational…
The vast majority of stars that populate the Universe will end their evolution as white-dwarf stars. Applications of white dwarfs include cosmochronology, evolution of planetary systems, and also as laboratories to study non-standard…
We calculate the expected white dwarf luminosity functions and discovery functions in photometric passbands, if these stellar remnants provide a substantial fraction of the sought Galactic dark matter, as suggested on various observational…
White dwarfs and neutron stars are stellar objects with masses comparable to that of our sun. However, as the endpoint stages of stellar evolution, these objects do not sustain any thermonuclear burning and therefore can no longer support…
In our galaxy, the white dwarfs (WDs) will inevitably capture the dark matter (DM) particles streaming through them, if there exist interactions between DM particles and nuclei/electrons. At the same time, these DM particles can also be…
Within the theoretical framework of some modern unification theories the constants of nature are functions of cosmological time. White dwarfs offer the possibility of testing a possible variation of G and, thus, to place constraints to…
In this paper we demonstrate how pulsating white dwarfs can be used as an astrophysical laboratory for empirically constraining convection in these stars. We do this using a technique for fitting observed non-sinusoidal light curves, which…
White dwarfs are excellent research laboratories as they reach temperatures, pressures, and magnetic fields that are unattainable on Earth. To better understand how these three physical parameters interact with each other and with other…
We summarize masses and radii for a number of white dwarfs as deduced from a combination of proper motion studies, Hipparcos parallax distances, effective temperatures, and binary or spectroscopic masses. A puzzling feature of these data is…
Axion-like particles (ALPs), a class of pseudoscalars common to many extensions of the Standard Model, have the capacity to drain energy from the interiors of stars. Consequently, stellar evolution can be used to derive many constraints on…
Probing the existence of hypothetical particles beyond the Standard model often deals with extreme parameters: large energies, tiny cross-sections, large time scales, etc. Sometimes laboratory experiments can test required regions of…
White dwarfs rotate. The angular momentum in single white dwarfs must originate early in the life of the star, but also must be modified (and perhaps severely modified) during the many stages of evolution between birth as a main--sequence…
The Peccei-Quinn mechanism proposed to solve the CP problem of Quantum Chromodynamics has as consequence the existence of axions, hypothetical weakly interacting particles whose mass is constrained to be on the sub-eV range. If these…
White dwarf cooling sequences provides a useful indicator of the evolutionary time scales involved in the chronometry and star formation history of the galactic disk and, for this reason, the luminosity function of white dwarfs has become a…
Recent studies reveal that more than a dozen of white dwarfs displaying near-perfect blackbody spectra in the optical range have been lurking in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalog. We point out that, in a way analogous to the Cosmic…
Over the last decade {\it ab initio} modeling of material properties has become widespread in diverse fields of research. It has proved to be a powerful tool for predicting various properties of matter under extreme conditions. We apply…
Pulsating white dwarfs, especially DBVs, can be used as laboratories to study elusive particles such as plasmon neutrinos and axions. In the degenerate interiors of DBVs, plasmon decay is the dominant neutrino producing process. We can…
White dwarfs (WDs) can be used as laboratories to test strong gravity and high-density regimes, once their equation of state is not so uncertain as the one of neutron stars. This makes them also a useful tool to constrain dark-matter…
In the course of their evolution, white-dwarf stars go through at least one phase of variability in which the global pulsations they undergo allow astronomers to peer into their interiors, this way making possible to shed light on their…