Related papers: The Galactic White Dwarf Population
Gaia will play an important role in providing information about star formation histories, merging events, intergalactic streams etc., for nearby galaxies of the Local Group. One of the most crucial contributions will be proper motions,…
We present a spectro-photometric analysis of 2880 cool white dwarfs within 100 pc of the Sun and cooler than Teff = 10,000 K, with grizy Pan-STARRS photometry and Gaia trigonometric parallaxes available. We also supplement our data sets…
White dwarfs represent the most common end stage of stellar evolution and are important for a range of astrophysical questions. The high-resolution ultraviolet spectroscopic capability of the Habitable World Observatory (HWO) offers a…
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…
White dwarfs are the dense, burnt-out remnants of the vast majority of stars, condemned to cool over billions of years as they steadily radiate away their residual thermal energy. To first order, their atmosphere is expected to be made…
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…
Binary stars containing a white dwarf and a main-sequence star, WDMS binaries, can be used to study a wide range of aspects of stellar astrophysics. We build a magnitude-limited sample of unresolved WDMS binaries from Gaia DR3 to enlarge…
The Gaia Data Release 1 (DR1) sample of white dwarf parallaxes is presented, including 6 directly observed degenerates and 46 white dwarfs in wide binaries. This data set is combined with spectroscopic atmospheric parameters to study the…
This chapter provides an in-depth overview of white dwarfs, the evolutionary terminus of the vast majority of stars. It discusses their discovery, their nature as degenerate objects, their connections to earlier phases of stellar evolution,…
We discuss the impact that Gaia, a European Space Agency (ESA) cornerstone mission that has been in scientific operations since July 2014, is expected to have on the definition of the cosmic distance ladder and the study of resolved stellar…
The $Gaia$ mission has provided an unprecedented wealth of information about the white dwarf population of our Galaxy. In particular, our studies show that the sample up to 100\,pc from the Sun can be considered as practically complete.…
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…
The second data release of ESA's Gaia satellite (Gaia DR2) revolutionised astronomy by providing accurate distances, proper motions, apparent magnitudes, and in many cases temperatures and radial velocities for an unprecedented number of…
As a result of competing physical mechanisms, the atmospheric composition of white dwarfs changes throughout their evolution, a process known as spectral evolution. Because of the ambiguity of their atmospheric compositions and the…
The third data release of Gaia was the first to include orbital solutions assuming non-single stars. Here, we apply the astrometric triage technique of Shahaf et al. to identify binary star systems with companions that are not single…
Short-period (P<1 hour) white dwarf binaries will be the most numerous sources for the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA. Based on thousands of resolved systems, we will be able to constrain binary evolution and provide a new map…
The third Gaia Data Release has provided the astronomical community with astrometric data of more than 1.8 billion sources, and low resolution spectra for 220 million. Such a large amount of data is difficult to handle by means of visual…
In its all-sky survey, Gaia will monitor astrometrically and photometrically millions of main-sequence stars with sufficient sensitivity to brown dwarf companions within a few AUs from their host stars and to transiting brown dwarfs on very…
Gaia-DR2 has provided an unprecedented number of white dwarf candidates of our Galaxy. In particular, it is estimated that Gaia-DR2 has observed nearly 400,000 of these objects and close to 18,000 up to 100 pc from the Sun. This large…
Stellar multiplicity is a fundamental ingredient of stellar astrophysics, yet binary statistics across the Galaxy remain poorly constrained. The \emph{Gaia} mission has revolutionised binary star astrophysics by delivering high-precision…