Related papers: Gaia - A White Dwarf Discovery Machine
Practically all known planet hosts will evolve into white dwarfs, and large parts of their planetary systems will survive this transition - the same is true for the solar system beyond the orbit of Mars. Spectroscopy of white dwarfs…
The Galaxy is suspected to contain hundreds of millions of binary white dwarf systems, a large fraction of which will have sufficiently small orbital period to emit gravitational radiation in band for space-based gravitational wave…
White dwarf stars are ubiquitous in the Galaxy, and are essential to understanding stellar evolution. While most white dwarfs are photometrically stable and reliable flux standards, some can be highly variable, which can reveal unique…
The GAIA satellite will provide unprecedented phase-space information for our Galaxy and enable a new era of Galactic dynamics. We may soon see successful realizations of Galactoseismology, i.e., inferring the characteristics of the…
Aims: We study single and binary white dwarfs in the inner halo of the Milky Way in order to learn more about the conditions under which the population of halo stars was born, such as the initial mass function (IMF), the star formation…
White dwarf stars are the most common endpoint of stellar evolution. Therefore, these old, numerous and compact objects provide valuable information on the late stages of stellar evolution, the physics of dense plasma and the structure and…
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…
We study the prospect of the Gaia satellite to identify black hole binary systems by detecting the orbital motion of the companion stars. Taking into account the initial mass function, mass transfer, common envelope phase, interstellar…
We present a critical review of the determination of fundamental parameters of white dwarfs discovered by the Gaia mission. We first reinterpret color-magnitude and color-color diagrams using photometric and spectroscopic information…
The white dwarf luminosity function has proven to be an excellent tool to study some properties of the galactic disk such as its age and the past history of the local star formation rate. The existence of an observational luminosity…
The Gaia mission will provide precise astrometry for an unprecedented number of white dwarfs (WDs), encoding information on stellar evolution, Type Ia supernovae progenitor scenarios, and the star formation and dynamical history of the…
The Gaia space astrometry mission is measuring accurate distances and space motions of more than two billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. This is a first look at how Gaia is contributing to fundamental physics, and in particular…
The Gaia Data Release 1 (DR1) sample of white dwarf parallaxes is presented, including 6 directly observed degenerates and 46 white dwarfs in wide binaries. This data set is combined with spectroscopic atmospheric parameters to study the…
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…
We used the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution catalogue, part of the Gaia Data Release 1, to search for candidate astrometric microlensing events expected to occur within the remaining lifetime of the Gaia satellite. Our search yielded one…
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…
The possibility that Galactic halo MACHOs are white dwarfs has recently attracted much attention. Using the known properties of white dwarf binaries in the Galactic disk as a model, we estimate the possible contribution of halo white dwarf…
The notion that microparsec-scale black holes can be used to probe gigaparsec-scale physics may seem counterintuitive, at first. Yet, the gravitational observatory LISA will detect cosmologically-distant coalescing pairs of massive black…
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…
We present the results of the very first search for faint Milky Way satellites in the Gaia data. Using stellar positions only, we are able to re-discover objects detected in much deeper data as recently as the last couple of years. While we…