Related papers: White Dwarfs in NGC 6791: Avoiding the Helium Flas…
Recent Monte Carlo plasma simulations to study in crystallizing carbon-oxygen (CO) white dwarfs (WDs) the phase separation of Ne22 (the most abundant metal after carbon and oxygen) have shown that, under the right conditions, a distillation…
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…
Using archival Hubble Space Telescope observations, we report the discovery of four variable low-mass white dwarfs ($0.18 \, M_\odot \leq M \leq 0.5 \,M_\odot$) in the globular cluster NGC 6397. One source exhibits a periodic optical…
NGC 6397 is one of the most interesting, well observed and theoretically studied globular clusters. The existing wealth of observations allows us to study the reliability of the theoretical white dwarf cooling sequences of low metallicity…
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…
A population of anomalous ultra-massive white dwarfs discovered with Gaia, often referred to as the Q branch, show high (multi-Gyr) cooling delays produced by exotic physical mechanisms. They are believed to be the products of stellar…
It is predicted that orbital decay by gravitational-wave radiation and tidal interaction will cause some close-binary stars to merge within a Hubble time. The merger of a helium-core white dwarf with a main-sequence star can produce a red…
Recently several type Ib supernovae (SNe; with the prototypical SN 2005E) have been shown to have atypical properties. These SNe are faint (absolute peak magnitude of ~ -15) and fast SNe that show unique composition. They are inferred to…
The MACHO collaboration lensing event statistics suggest that a significant fraction of the dark galactic halo can be comprised of baryonic matter in the form of white dwarf stars with masses between 0.1 and 1.0 \Msun . Such a halo white…
We present new white dwarf cooling models which incorporate an accurate outer boundary condition based on new opacity and detailed radiative transfer calculations. We find that helium atmosphere dwarfs cool considerably faster than has…
We obtain high resolution spectra of nine red giant branch stars in NGC 6681 and perform the first detailed abundance analysis of stars in this cluster. We confirm cluster membership for these stars based on consistent radial velocities of…
The evidence is becoming strong that the luminosity function of galaxies varies with environment. Higher density, more dynamically evolved regions appear to have more dwarfs per giant. The situation is becoming clearer as a result of wide…
Hot subdwarf stars with masses above $0.8 M_\odot$ ascend the helium giant branch after the end of core helium burning, before entering the white dwarf cooling track or exploding as type Ib/c supernovae. Such massive helium stars are…
We have investigated the origin of a sub-class of carbon-polluted white dwarfs (DQ) originally identified as the ``hot DQ" white dwarfs. These objects are relatively hot (10 000 < T_eff < 25 000 K), have markedly higher carbon abundance…
We present a grid of evolutionary tracks for low-mass white dwarfs with helium cores in the mass range from 0.179 to 0.414 Msol. The lower mass limit is well-suited for comparison with white dwarf companions of millisecond pulsars. The…
Due to their high photospheric density, cool helium-rich white dwarfs (particularly DZ, DQpec and ultracool) are often poorly described by current atmosphere models. As part of our ongoing efforts to design atmosphere models suitable for…
A detailed analysis of halo white dwarf candidates is presented, which is based on model atmosphere fits to observed energy distributions built from photoelectric or photographic magnitudes. Most of the candidates identified in reduced…
Dark matter could have a dissipative asymmetric subcomponent in the form of atomic dark matter (aDM). This arises in many scenarios of dark complexity, and is a prediction of neutral naturalness, such as the Mirror Twin Higgs model. We show…
Hydrogen deficient stars include the cool R CrB variable (RCBs) and hydrogen-deficient carbon (HdCs) giants through extreme helium stars (EHes) to the very hot helium-rich subdwarfs (He-sdO and O(He) stars) and white dwarfs. With surfaces…
The evolution of white dwarfs is a simple gravothermal process of cooling. Since the shape of their luminosity function is sensitive to the characteristic cooling time, it is possible to use its slope to test the existence of additional…