Related papers: White Dwarf Stars in the Big Data Era
Understanding the formation, evolution, and chemical diversity of exoplanets are now central areas of astrophysics research. White dwarfs provide a uniquely sensitive laboratory for studying the end stages of planetary-system evolution and…
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…
Deriving precise stellar ages is a challenging task. Consequently, age-dependent relations - such as the age-metallicity and age-velocity dispersion relations of the Milky Way, or the age-rotation-activity relation of low-mass stars - are…
The $Gaia$ mission has detected many white dwarfs (WDs) in binary and triple configurations, and while observations suggest that triple stellar systems are common in our Galaxy, not much attention was devoted to WDs in triples. For…
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…
We investigate the potential of high-precision astrometry with GAIA for detection of giant planetary companions to nearby white dwarfs. If one considers that, to date, no confirmed planets around single white dwarfs are known, the results…
We discuss some of our current knowledge of the mass distribution of DA and non-DA stars using various methods for measuring white dwarf masses including spectroscopic, trigonometric parallax, and gravitational redshift measurements, with a…
During the final evolution of most stars, they shed their outer skin and expose their core of the hot ashes of nuclear burning. As these hot and very dense cores cool into white dwarf stars, they go through episodes of multiperiodic,…
There are a few different mechanisms that can cause white dwarf stars to vary in brightness, providing opportunities to probe the physics, structures, and formation of these compact stellar remnants. The observational characteristics of the…
One of the most promising space missions of ESA is the astrometric satellite Gaia, which will provide very precise astrometry and multicolour photometry, for all 1.3 billion objects to V~20, and radial velocities with accuracies of a few…
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…
Galactic history is written in the white dwarf stars. Their surface properties hint at interiors composed of matter under extreme conditions. In the forty years since their discovery, pulsating white dwarf stars have moved from side-show…
To date not a single-bona fide planet has been identified orbiting a single white dwarf. In fact we are ignorant about the final configuration of >95% of planetary systems. Theoretical models predict a gap in the final distribution of…
The Gaia mission will provide precise astrometry for an unprecedented number of white dwarfs (WDs), encoding information on stellar evolution, Type Ia supernovae progenitor scenarios, and the star formation and dynamical history of the…
The Gaia data will help to improve the construction of a luminosity function for the disk and the halo and will provide a more accurate determination of the age of our solar neighborhood. Moreover, reliable stellar dynamical investigations…
The accretion of tidally disrupted planetary bodies is the current consensus model for the presence of photospheric metals commonly detected in white dwarfs. While most dynamical studies have considered a single star and associated…
White dwarfs (WDs) are powerful tools to study the evolutionary history of stars and binaries in the Galaxy. But do we understand their multiplicity from a theoretical point of view? This can be tested by a comparison with the sample of WDs…
Results are presented for a Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys high-resolution imaging campaign of 90 white dwarfs with known or suspected low mass stellar and substellar companions. Of the 72 targets which remain candidate…
White dwarf binaries are fundamental astrophysical probes. They represent ideal laboratories to test the models of binary evolution, which also apply to the sources of gravitational waves, whose detection led to the award of the 2017 Nobel…
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…