Related papers: A pulsating white dwarf in an eclipsing binary
Eclipsing systems are essential objects for understanding the properties of stars and stellar systems. Eclipsing systems with pulsating components are furthermore advantageous because they provide accurate constraints on the component…
White dwarfs are compact stars, similar in size to Earth but ~200,000 times more massive. Isolated white dwarfs emit most of their power from ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, but when in close orbits with less dense stars, white…
Planets and other low-mass binary companions to stars face a variety of potential fates as their host stars move off the main sequence and grow to subgiants and giants. Stellar mass loss tends to make orbits expand, and tidal torques tend…
White dwarfs with log g lower than 7.0 are called Extremely Low Mass white dwarfs (ELMs). They were first found as companions to pulsars, then to other white dwarfs and main sequence stars (The ELM Survey: 2010 to 2016), and can only be…
White dwarfs are dense, cooling stellar embers consisting mostly of carbon and oxygen, or oxygen and neon (with a few percent carbon) at higher initial stellar masses. These stellar cores are enveloped by a shell of helium which in turn is…
Pulsars in close binary orbit around another neutron star or a massive white dwarf make ideal laboratories for testing the predictions of gravitational radiation and self-gravitational effects. We report new timing measurements of the…
White dwarf (WD) stars are considered cosmic laboratories to study the physics of dense plasma. Furthermore, the use of WD stars as cosmic clocks to date stellar populations and main sequence companions demands an appropriate understanding…
We study the orbital evolution of wide binary stars in the solar neighborhood due to gravitational perturbations from passing stars. We include the effects of the Galactic tidal field and continue to follow the stars after they become…
With the prevalence of wide-field, time-domain photometric sky surveys, the number of eclipsing white dwarf systems being discovered is increasing dramatically. An efficient method to follow these up will be key to determining any…
The project Massive Unseen Companions to Hot Faint Underluminous Stars from SDSS (MUCHFUSS) aims at finding hot subdwarf stars with massive compact companions like massive white dwarfs (M > 1.0 Msun), neutron stars or stellar mass black…
White dwarfs comprise 95% of all stellar remnants, and are thus an excellent tracer of old stellar populations in the Milky Way. Current and planned telescopes are not able to directly probe the white dwarf population in its entirety due to…
A number of efforts are underway to detect close binary stars in planetary nebulae. The primary goal of these studies is to determine the binary fraction of central stars. The next stage is a detailed analysis of the binaries to determine…
The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…
We present some of the results of a survey aimed at exploring the asteroseismological potential of the newly-discovered carbon-atmosphere white dwarfs. We show that, in certains regions of parameter space, carbon-atmosphere white dwarfs may…
The white dwarfs are promising laboratories for the study of cosmochronology and stellar evolution. Through observations of the pulsating white dwarfs, we can measure their internal structures and compositions, critical to understanding…
We present a new method that investigates the evolutionary history of the pulsating DB white dwarf GD358 using asteroseismology. This is done considering the internal C/O profile, which describes the relative abundances of carbon and oxygen…
The White Dwarf Binary Pathways Survey aims at increasing the number of known detached A, F, G and K main sequence stars in close orbits with white dwarf companions (WD+AFGK binaries) to refine our understanding about compact binary…
Stars are stretched by tidal interactions in tight binaries, and changes to their projected areas introduce photometric variations twice per orbit. Hermes et al. (2014, ApJ, 792, 39) utilized measurements of these ellipsoidal variations to…
White Dwarfs (WDs) are the final evolutionary product of the vast majority of stars in the Universe. They are electron-degenerate structures characterized by no stable thermonuclear activity, and their evolution is generally described as a…
We demonstrate that plasmon neutrinos are the dominant form of energy loss in model white dwarf stars down to T_eff ~ 25,000 K, depending on the stellar mass. The lower end of this range overlaps the observed temperatures for the V777 Her…