相关论文: Cool white dwarfs : cooling theory and Galactic im…
White dwarfs are almost completely degenerate objects that cannot obtain energy from the thermonuclear sources and their evolution is just a gravothermal process of cooling. The simplicity of these objects, the fact that the physical inputs…
Little is known about the incidence of magnetic fields among the coolest white dwarfs. Their spectra usually do not exhibit any absorption lines as the bound-bound opacities of hydrogen and helium are vanishingly small. Probing these stars…
We present parallax observations and a detailed model atmosphere analysis of 54 cool and ultracool ($T_{\rm eff}$ < 4000 K) white dwarfs (WDs) in the solar neighbourhood. For the first time, a large number of cool and ultracool WDs have…
It has been shown that the shape of the luminosity function of white dwarfs can be a powerful tool to check for the possible existence of DFSZ-axions. In particular, Isern et al. (2008) showed that, if the axion mass is of the order of a…
We use the irradiated secondary star in the remnant of Nova Cyg 1975 as a probe of the cooling white dwarf. At superior conjunction the flux in the B band is dominated by the irradiated face of the secondary star. The heated face produces…
We investigate the evolution of cooling helium atmosphere white dwarfs using a full evolutionary code, specifically developed for following the effects of element diffusion and gravitational settling on white dwarf cooling. The major…
Using images from the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys, we measure the rate of cooling of white dwarfs in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae and compare it to modelled cooling curves. We examine the effects of the outer…
We present new spectroscopic and photometric measurements of the white dwarfs LHS 3250 and WD 0346+246. Along with F351-50, these white dwarfs are the coolest ones known, all with effective temperatures below 4000 K. Their membership in the…
Cool white dwarfs with Teff < 6000 K are the remnants of the oldest stars that existed in our Galaxy. Their atmospheres, when properly characterized, can provide valuable information on white dwarf evolution and ultimately star formation…
We have paired the Second Data Release of the Large Area Survey of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey with the Fifth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to identify ten cool white dwarf candidates, from their photometry and…
The white dwarf luminosity function of a stellar cluster will have a sharp truncation at a luminosity which is determined by the time since formation of the first white dwarfs in that cluster. Calculation of the dependence of this limiting…
We investigate the luminosity suppression and its effect on the mass-radius relation as well as cooling evolution of highly magnetised white dwarfs. Based on the effect of magnetic field relative to gravitational energy, we suitably modify…
The white dwarf luminosity function, which provides information about their cooling, has been measured with high precision in the past few years. Simulations that include well known Standard Model physics give a good fit to the data. This…
As they evolve, white dwarfs undergo major changes in surface composition, a phenomenon known as spectral evolution. In particular, some stars enter the cooling sequence with helium atmospheres (type DO) but eventually develop hydrogen…
Motivated by the strong discrepancy between the main sequence turn-off age and the white dwarf cooling age in the metal-rich open cluster NGC 6791, we compute a grid of white dwarf evolutionary sequences that incorporates for the first time…
We demonstrate that plasmon neutrinos are the dominant form of energy loss in model white dwarf stars down to T_eff ~ 25,000 K, depending on the stellar mass. The lower end of this range overlaps the observed temperatures for the V777 Her…
There are currently two open questions in white dwarf physics: why are massive dwarfs observed less often in astronomical surveys, and why have not any super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs been found despite the discovery of more than a dozen…
We respond to the paper by De Marchi, Paresce, Straniero and Moroni (2003) on the white dwarf cooling age of M4. The authors question the data analysis and interpretation that led to the conclusions in Hansen et al. (2002). In their paper,…
We consider the problem of radiative transfer in stellar atmospheres where the index of refraction departs from unity and is a function of density and temperature. We present modified Feautrier and Lambda-iteration methods to solve the…
We report our study of features at the observed red end of the white dwarf cooling sequences for three Galactic globular clusters: NGC\,6397, 47\,Tucanae and M\,4. We use deep colour-magnitude diagrams constructed from archival Hubble Space…