New mass limit of white dwarfs
arXiv:1305.3987 · doi:10.1142/S0218271813420042
Abstract
Is the Chandrasekhar mass limit for white dwarfs (WDs) set in stone? Not anymore -- recent observations of over-luminous, peculiar type Ia supernovae can be explained if significantly super-Chandrasekhar WDs exist as their progenitors, thus barring them to be used as cosmic distance indicators. However, there is no estimate of a mass limit for these super-Chandrasekhar WD candidates yet. Can they be arbitrarily large? In fact, the answer is no! We arrive at this revelation by exploiting the flux freezing theorem in observed, accreting, magnetized WDs, which brings in Landau quantization of the underlying electron degenerate gas. This essay presents the calculations which pave the way for the ultimate (significantly super-Chandrasekhar) mass limit of WDs, heralding a paradigm shift 80 years after Chandrasekhar's discovery.
6 pages; received Honorable Mention in the Gravity Research Foundation 2013 Awards for Essays on Gravitation; version accepted for publication in IJMPD
References in corpus (4)
- The type Ia supernova SNLS-03D3bb from a super-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf star
- New mass limit for white dwarfs: super-Chandrasekhar type Ia supernova as a new standard candle
- Strongly magnetized cold electron degenerate gas: Mass-radius relation of the magnetized white dwarf
- A possible evolutionary scenario of highly magnetized super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs: progenitors of peculiar type Ia supernovae
Cited by in corpus (10)
- Conformally flat polytropes for anisotropic matter
- Maximum mass of stable magnetized highly super-Chandrasekhar white dwarfs: stable solutions with varying magnetic fields
- GRMHD formulation of highly super-Chandrasekhar rotating magnetised white dwarfs: Stable configurations of non-spherical white dwarfs
- Extra packing of mass of anisotropic interiors induced by MGD
- GRMHD formulation of highly super-Chandrasekhar magnetized white dwarfs: stable configurations of non-spherical white dwarfs
- On the maximum mass of magnetised white dwarfs
- Carbon-oxygen-neon mass nuclei in superstrong magnetic fields
- Soft gamma-ray repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars as highly magnetized white dwarfs
- Significantly super-Chandrasekhar mass-limit of white dwarfs in noncommutative geometry
- Self-Gravitating Relativistic Models of Fermions with Anisotropy and Cutoff Energy in their Distribution Function