Related papers: White Dwarfs in Open Clusters: Calibrating the Clo…
We investigate the relationship between age and chromospheric activity for 139 M dwarf stars in wide binary systems with white dwarf companions. The age of each system is determined from the cooling age of its white dwarf component. The…
We review our the status of the photometric searches of brown dwarfs and vely low mass stars in several young open clusters and present some results on the spectroscopic follow-up, including new cluster ages based on the position of the…
We present a program designed to obtain age-rotation measurements of solar-type dwarfs to be used in the calibration of gyrochronology relations at ages of several Gyr. This is a region of parameter space crucial for the large-scale study…
The Gaia mission has provided highly accurate observations that have significantly reduced the scatter in the colour-magnitude diagrams of open clusters. As a result of the improved isochrone sequence of the open cluster M67, we have…
White dwarfs (WDs), the evolutionary endpoints of most stars, can form through both single-star and binary channels. While single-star evolutionary models enable reliable WD age estimates, binary evolution introduces interactions that can…
Galactic history is written in the white dwarf stars. Their surface properties hint at interiors composed of matter under extreme conditions. In the forty years since their discovery, pulsating white dwarf stars have moved from side-show…
We describe a new multi-colour proper motion survey for cool white dwarfs (CWDs). The observational database consists of ~300 digitally scanned Schmidt plates in ESO/SERC field 287. The entire survey procedure, from the raw Schmidt plate…
Brown dwarfs are natural clocks, cooling and dimming over time due to insufficient core fusion. They are also numerous and present in nearly all Galactic environments, making them potentially useful chronometers for a variety of Galactic…
We present new evolutionary stellar models suitable for old Population I clusters, discussing both the consequences of the most recent improvements in the input physics and the effect of element diffusion within the stellar structures.…
The history of stellar seismology suggests that observation and theory often take turns advancing our understanding. The recent tripling of the sample of pulsating white dwarfs generated by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey represents a giant…
Gyrochronology can yield useful ages for field main-sequence stars, a regime where other techniques are problematic. Typically, gyrochronology relations are calibrated using young ($\lesssim 2$ Gyr) clusters, but the constraints at older…
We present our new, fully-automated method to detect and measure the ages of star clusters in nearby galaxies, where individual stars can be resolved. The method relies purely on statistical analysis of observations and Monte-Carlo…
We have obtained 53 images with the $g$ filter and 19 images with the $i$ filter, each with 600-second exposures of the super metal rich open cluster NGC 6253 with the Gemini-South telescope to create deep images of the cluster to observe…
Given the importance of white dwarfs (WDs) in many fields of modern astrophysics, the precise knowledge of the actual degree of accuracy of the associated theoretical predictions is a primary task. In the first paper of a series dedicated…
We review five independent techniques which are used to set the distance scale to globular clusters, including subdwarf main sequence fitting utilizing the recent Hipparcos parallax catalogue. These data together all indicate that globular…
Determining the properties of old stellar populations (those with age >1 Gyr) has long involved the comparison of their integrated light, either in the form of photometry or spectroscopic indexes, with empirical or synthetic templates. Here…
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…
Using the most recent results about white dwarfs in 10 open clusters, we revisit semi-empirical estimates of the initial-final mass relation in star clusters, with emphasis on the use of stellar evolution models. We discuss the influence of…
White dwarf spectroscopic characterization is entering a big data era, with the number of spectroscopically characterized white dwarfs expected to grow from $\sim$100,000 to over 300,000 in upcoming years. Traditional methods like…
We make use of a previous well tested Galactic model, but describing the observational behavior of the various stellar components in terms of suitable assumptions on their evolutionary status. In this way we are able to predict the expected…