Related papers: The Galactic White Dwarf Population
White dwarf stars, the endpoint of stellar evolution for 97% of stars in our Milky Way, offer a unique and powerful window into the bulk elemental composition of rocky exoplanetary bodies. Up to 50% of single white dwarfs are observed with…
On the basis of theoretical evolutionary expectations, we develop a Galactic model reproducing star counts and synthetic color-magnitude diagrams of field stars, which include the white dwarf (WD) population. In this way we are able to…
Measuring the mass-radius relation of individual white dwarfs is an empirically challenging task that has been performed for only a few dozen stars. We measure the white dwarf mass-radius relation using gravitational redshifts and radii of…
Thanks to the recent space-borne mission Gaia, there is a nearly complete sample of white dwarfs up to about 100 parsecs from the Sun, which may have very diverse origins. We aim to compute the Galactic orbits for white dwarfs observed in…
The Gaia colour--magnitude diagram reveals a striking separation between hydrogen-atmosphere white dwarfs and their helium-atmosphere counterparts throughout a significant portion of the white dwarf cooling track. However, pure-helium…
We present a catalog of 531 white dwarf candidates that have large apparent transverse motions relative to the Sun ($v_{T} > 200$ km s$^{-1}$), thus making them likely members of the local Galactic halo population. The candidates were…
Stellar clusters are important for astrophysics in many ways, for instance as optimal tracers of the Galactic populations to which they belong or as one of the best test bench for stellar evolutionary models. Gaia DR1, with TGAS, is just…
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…
In astrophysics, we often aim to estimate one or more parameters for each member object in a population and study the distribution of the fitted parameters across the population. In this paper, we develop novel methods that allow us to take…
We present a comprehensive overview of a volume-complete sample of white dwarfs located within 40 pc of the Sun, a significant proportion of which were detected in Gaia Data Release 3 (DR3). Our DR3 sample contains 1076 spectroscopically…
We discuss the feasibility of using astrophysical observations of white dwarfs as probes of fundamental physics. We quantify the effects of varying fundamental couplings on the white dwarf mass-radius relation in a broad class of…
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…
Using Gaia DR2 data, we present an up-to-date sample of white dwarfs within 20 pc of the Sun. In total we identified 139 systems in Gaia DR2, nine of which are new detections, with the closest of these located at a distance of 13.05 pc. We…
In its all-sky survey, the ESA global astrometry mission Gaia will perform high-precision astrometry and photometry for 1 billion stars down to $V = 20$ mag. The data collected in the Gaia catalogue, to be published by the end of the next…
Close white dwarf binaries play an important role across a range of astrophysics, including thermonuclear supernovae, the Galactic low-frequency gravitational wave signal, and the chemical evolution of the Galaxy. Progress in developing a…
Large spectroscopic surveys have enabled in the recent years the computation of three-dimensional interstellar extinction maps thanks to accurate stellar atmospheric parameters and line-of-sight distances. Such maps are complementary to 3D…
This review aims to give an overview of the contribution of the Hubble Space Telescope to our understanding of the detailed properties of Local Group dwarf galaxies and their older stellar populations. The exquisite stable high spatial…
The extensive stellar spectroscopic datasets that are available for studies in Galactic Archeaology thanks to, for example, the Gaia-ESO Survey, now benefit from having a significant number of targets that overlap with asteroseismology…
We have exploited the very precise parallaxes, proper motions and photometry of \textit{Gaia}\, Data Release~2 to study white dwarf members of the Hyades star cluster. Gaia photometry and parallaxes for the eight DA white dwarfs confirmed…
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…