Related papers: White Dwarf Rotation: Observations and Theory
Theories that attempt to unify the four fundamental interactions and alternative theories of gravity predict time and/or spatial variation of the fundamental constants of nature. Different versions of these theories predict different…
The vast majority of stars that populate the Universe will end their evolution as white-dwarf stars. Applications of white dwarfs include cosmochronology, evolution of planetary systems, and also as laboratories to study non-standard…
It has been recently suggested that white dwarfs generate magnetic fields in a process analogous to the Earth. The crystallization of the core creates a compositional inversion that drives convection, and combined with rotation, this can…
Rotating magnetized white dwarfs are studied within the framework of general relativity using Hartle's formalism. Matter inside magnetized white dwarfs is described by an equation of state of particles under the action of a constant…
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,…
Observations of white dwarfs in the globular clusters NGC 6397 and Omega Centauri indicate that these stars may get a velocity kick during their time as giants. If the mass loss while on the asymptotic giant branch is slightly asymmetric,…
Recent studies suggest that the angular momentum evolution of late-M and brown dwarfs differs from the well-known spin-down evolution of hotter stars. Characterizing the distribution of rotation periods of these objects in the solar…
In this work, cold and hot, static and rotating white dwarf stars are investigated within the framework of classical physics, employing the Chandrasekhar equation of state. The main parameters of white dwarfs such as the central density,…
Stars lose a significant amount of angular momentum between birth and death, implying that efficient processes transporting it from the core to the surface are active. Space asteroseismology delivered the interior rotation rates of more…
Several groups have recently suggested that small planets orbiting very closely around white dwarf stars could be promising locations for life to arise, even after stellar death. There are still many uncertainties, however, regarding the…
The Be star sample of Steele et al. (1998) has a distribution of v sin i's that is luminosity dependant, with giants having lower projected rotational velocities than dwarfs. We show that this effect can be understood simply in terms of…
The measured rates of period change, $\dot{P}$, in the signals of pulsating white dwarf stars are often interpreted as direct detections of structural changes from secular cooling. Due to the intrinsic nature of this quantity, $\dot{P}$…
We present rotation period measurements for 41 field M-dwarfs, all of which have masses inferred (from their parallaxes and 2MASS K-band magnitudes) to be between the hydrogen burning limit and 0.35 Msol, and thus should remain…
We consider the evolution of white dwarfs with compact object companions (specifically black holes with masses up to 10^6 solar masses, neutron stars, and other white dwarfs). We suppose that the orbits are initially quite elliptical and…
White dwarfs are a class of stars with unique physical properties. They present many challenging problems whose solution requires the application of advanced theories of dense matter, state-of-the-art experimental techniques, and extensive…
White dwarfs offer a unique opportunity to search nearby stellar systems for signs of life, but the habitable zone around these stars is still poorly understood. Since white dwarfs are compact stars with low luminosity, any planets in their…
The rotation of horizontal branch stars places important constraints on angular momentum evolution in evolved stars and therefore rotational mixing on the giant branch. Prompted by new observations of rotation rates of horizontal branch…
We use the most recent, complete and independent measurements of masses and radii of white dwarfs in binaries to bound the class of non-trivial modified gravity theories, viable after GW170817/GRB170817, using its effect on the mass-radius…
The properties of uniformly rotating white dwarfs are analyzed within the framework of general relativity. Hartle's formalism is applied to construct self-consistently the internal and external solutions to the Einstein equations. The mass,…
We study a white dwarf with differential rotation and magnetic field, for which the symmetry axis of the toroidal field, the magnetic axis of the poloidal field, and the principal axis I_3 coincide permanently. This common axis, so-called…