Related papers: White Dwarf Stars in the Big Data Era
With the state-of-the-art Gaia astrometry, the number of confirmed white dwarfs has reached a few hundred thousand. We have reached the era where small features in the white dwarf luminosity function (WDLF) of the solar neighbourhood can be…
I discuss and consider the status of observational determinations of the rotation velocities of white dwarf stars via asteroseismology and spectroscopy. While these observations have important implications on our understanding of the…
A White Dwarf (WD) star and a main-sequence companion may interact through their different stellar evolution stages. This sort of binary population has historically helped us improve our understanding of binary formation and evolution…
Close pairs of white dwarfs are potential progenitors of Type~Ia supernovae and they are common, with of order 100 -- 300 million in the Galaxy. As such they will be significant, probably dominant, sources of the gravitational waves…
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…
The third data release of Gaia introduced a large catalog of astrometric binaries, out of which about 3,200 are likely main-sequence stars with a white-dwarf (WD) companion. These binaries are typically found with orbital separations of ~1…
A popular interpretation of recent microlensing studies of the line of sight towards the Large Magellanic Cloud invokes a population of old white dwarf stars in the Galactic halo. Below I review the basic properties of old white dwarf stars…
We review empirical and theoretical findings concerning white dwarfs in Galactic globular clusters. Since their detection is a critical issue we describe in detail the various efforts to find white dwarfs in globular clusters. We then…
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…
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…
Understanding stellar evolution and its effect on planetary systems is crucial for correctly interpreting the chemical constraints of exo-planetary material that can be given to us by white dwarfs. This article will describe how asteroids,…
Thanks to Gaia and large-scale spectroscopic follow-up surveys (4MOST, DESI, WEAVE, SDSS-V), it is now possible to build representative and minimally biased samples of the local white dwarf population. Here we analyse several volume-limited…
Stellar multiplicity is among the oldest and richest problems in astrophysics. Binary stars are a cornerstone of stellar mass and radius measurements that underpin modern stellar evolutionary models. Binaries are the progenitors of many of…
White dwarfs with emission lines from gaseous debris discs are among the rarest examples of planetary remnant hosts, but at the same time they are key objects for studying the final evolutionary stage of planetary systems. Making use of the…
The discovery of wide, eccentric Gaia neutron stars (NSs) in binaries with still evolving (likely main sequence) companions offers a new probe of mass transfer and pulsar recycling beyond the compact-binary regime. We model their origins…
The recent discovery of microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud has excited much interest in the nature of the lensing population. Detailed analyses indicate that the mass of these objects ranges from 0.3-0.8 solar masses,…
A number of so-called ultra-cool white dwarfs have been detected in different surveys so far. However, based on anecdotal evidence it is believed that most or all of these ultra-cool white dwarfs are low-mass products of binary evolution…
White dwarfs are the burnt out cores of Sun-like stars and are the final fate of 97% of all stars in our Galaxy. The internal structure and composition of white dwarfs are hidden by their high gravities, which causes all elements, apart…
With the imminent start of the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and several new space telescopes expected to begin operations later in this decade, both time domain and wide-field astronomy are on…
The observable characteristics and subsequent evolution of young stellar populations is dominated by their massive stars. As our understanding of those massive stars and the factors affecting their evolution improves, so our interpretation…