Related papers: The White Dwarf Deficit in Open Clusters: Dynamica…
It has long been accepted that a possible mechanism for explaining the existence of magnetic white dwarfs is the merger of a binary white dwarf system, as there are viable mechanisms for producing sustainable magnetic fields within the…
Gaia Data Release 2 revealed a population of ultramassive white dwarfs on the Q branch that are moving anomalously fast for a local disc population with their young photometric ages. As the velocity dispersion of stars in the local disc…
Recent observations of galaxy mergers inside galaxy cluster environments report high star formation rates in the ejected tidal tails, which point towards currently developing tidal dwarf galaxies. We test whether these dwarf objects could…
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…
Magnetic fields can play an important role in stellar evolution. Among white dwarfs, the most common stellar remnant, the fraction of magnetic systems is more than 20 per cent. The origin of magnetic fields in white dwarfs, which show…
Observations and theory both suggest that star clusters form sub-virial (cool) with highly sub-structured distributions. We perform a large ensemble of N-body simulations of moderate-sized (N=1000) cool, fractal clusters to investigate…
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…
We conjecture that brown dwarfs are substellar objects because they have been ejected from small newborn multiple systems which have decayed in dynamical interactions. In this view, brown dwarfs are stellar embryos for which the star…
Nuclear star clusters (NSCs) are the densest stellar systems in the Universe. They can be found at the center of all galaxy types, but tend to favor galaxies of intermediate stellar mass around 10$^9\,$M$_{\odot}$[1, 2]. Currently, two main…
We present an alternative interpretation of the nature of the extremely cool, high-velocity white dwarfs identified by Oppenheimer et al (2001) in a high-latitude astrometric survey. We argue that the velocity distribution of the majority…
The maximum mass of a star that can produce a white dwarf (WD) is an important astrophysical quantity. One of the best approaches to establishing this limit is to search for WDs in young star clusters in which only massive stars have had…
A secular variation of $G$ modifies the structure and evolutionary time scales of white dwarfs. Using an state-of-the-art stellar evolutionary code, an up-to-date pulsational code, and a detailed population synthesis code we demonstrate…
We have performed a search for halo white dwarfs as high proper motion objects in a second epoch WFPC2 image of the Groth-Westphal strip. We identify 24 high proper motion objects with mu > 0.014 ''/yr. Five of these high proper motion…
Recent observations of volume-limited samples of magnetic white dwarfs (WD) have revealed a higher incidence of magnetism in older WDs. Specifically, these studies indicate that magnetism is more prevalent in WDs with fully or partially…
Massive stars can be efficiently ejected from their birth clusters through encounters with other massive stars. We study how the dynamical ejection fraction of O star systems varies with the masses of very young star clusters, Mecl, by…
We find a remarkably enhanced production rate in star clusters (relative to the field) of very short period, massive double-white-dwarf stars and of giant-white dwarf binaries. These results are based on N-body simulations performed with…
We construct from Gaia DR2 an extensive and very pure ($\lesssim 0.2\%$ contamination) catalog of wide binaries containing main-sequence (MS) and white dwarf (WD) components within 200 pc of the Sun. The public catalog contains, after…
We present an analysis of the kinematics of Galactic disc white dwarf stars in the Solar neighbourhood using data from Gaia Data Release 2. Selection of white dwarfs based on parallax provides the first large, kinematically unbiased sample…
White dwarfs are routinely observed to have polluted atmospheres, and sometimes significant infrared excesses, that indicate ongoing accretion of circumstellar dust and rocky debris. Typically this debris is assumed to be in the form of a…
Several observational and theoretical studies suggest that the initial mass function (IMF) slope for massive stars in globular clusters (GCs) depends on the initial cloud density and metallicity, such that the IMF becomes increasingly…