The Star Formation History of the Solar Neighbourhood from the White Dwarf Luminosity Function

Abstract

The termination in the white dwarf luminosity function is a standard diagnostic tool for measuring the total age of nearby stellar populations. In this paper, an algorithm is presented for inverting the full white dwarf luminosity function to obtain a maximum likelihood estimate of the time varying star formation rate of the host stellar population. Tests with synthetic data demonstrate that the algorithm converges over a wide class of underlying star formation rate forms. The algorithm successfully estimates the moving average star formation rate as a function of lookback time in the presence of realistic measurement noise, though suffers from degeneracies around discontinuities in the underlying star formation rate. The inversion results are most sensitive to the choice of white dwarf cooling models, with the models produced by different groups giving quite different results. The results are relatively insensitive to the progenitor metallicity, initial mass function, initial-final mass relation and ratio of H/He atmosphere white dwarfs. Application to two independent determinations of the Solar neighbourhood white dwarf luminosity function gives similar results. The star formation rate has a bimodal form, with broad peaks at 2-3 Gyr and 7-9 Gyr in the past, separated by a significant lull of magnitude 30-90% depending on choice of cooling models. The onset of star formation occurs around 8-10 Gyr ago. The total integrated star formation rate is ~0.014 stars/pc3 in the Solar neighbourhood, for stars more massive than 0.6M_{solar}.

18 pages, 17 figures. Accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (8)

• Scaled solar tracks and isochrones in a large region of the Z-Y plane I. From the ZAMS to the TP-AGB end for 0.15 - 2.5 Mo stars
• The Initial-Final Mass Relation: Direct Constraints at the Low Mass End
• The initial-final mass relationship of white dwarfs revisited: effect on the luminosity function and mass distribution
• Axions and the cooling of white dwarf stars
• Recovering the star formation rate in the solar neighborhood
• The Ratio of Helium- to Hydrogen-Atmosphere White Dwarfs: Direct Evidence for Convective Mixing
• The Puzzling White Dwarf Cooling Sequence in NGC6791: A Simple Solution
• Revisiting the Impact of Axions in the Cooling of White Dwarfs

Cited by in corpus (46)

• Mind your Ps and Qs: the Interrelation between Period (P) and Mass-ratio (Q) Distributions of Binary Stars
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: The Gaia Catalogue of Nearby Stars
• Revisiting the axion bounds from the Galactic white dwarf luminosity function
• When the Milky Way turned off the lights: APOGEE provides evidence of star formation quenching in our Galaxy
• A White Dwarf catalogue from Gaia-DR2 and the Virtual Observatory
• Current challenges in the physics of white dwarf stars
• The Field White Dwarf Mass Distribution
• Stars with Photometrically Young Gaia Luminosities Around the Solar System (SPYGLASS) I: Mapping Young Stellar Structures and their Star Formation Histories
• White Dwarf Cosmochronology in the Solar Neighborhood
• $\text{Gaia}$ white dwarfs within 40 pc I: spectroscopic observations of new candidates
• The Canada-France Imaging Survey: Reconstructing the Milky Way Star Formation History from its White Dwarf Population
• The age-chemical abundance structure of the Galactic disc II: $\alpha$-dichotomy and thick disc formation
• The Catalog of Earth-Like Exoplanet Survey TArgets (CELESTA): A Database of Habitable Zones around Nearby Stars
• The white dwarf luminosity function
• Random Forest identification of the thin disk, thick disk and halo Gaia-DR2 white dwarf population
• The Fifth Catalogue of Nearby Stars (CNS5)
• The star formation history in the solar neighborhood as told by massive white dwarfs
• The population of white dwarf-main sequence binaries in the SDSS DR 12
• Axions and the luminosity function of white dwarfs. The thin and thick disks, and the halo
• A 1.05 $M_{\odot }$ Companion to PSR J2222-0137: The Coolest Known White Dwarf?
• Limits on the neutrino magnetic dipole moment from the luminosity function of hot white dwarfs
• Spectral analysis of ultra-cool white dwarfs polluted by planetary debris
• The mass function of hydrogen-rich white dwarfs: robust observational evidence for a distinctive high-mass excess near 1Msun
• The Optical/Near-Infrared Extinction Law In Highly Reddened Regions
• White dwarfs as Physics laboratories: lights and shadows
• A population synthesis fitting of the $Gaia$ resolved white dwarf binary population within 100 pc
• Local stellar formation history from the 40 pc white dwarf sample
• Dissecting the Gaia HR diagram within 200 pc
• DA white dwarfs from the LSS-GAC survey DR1: the preliminary luminosity and mass functions and formation rate
• The white dwarf population within 40 pc of the Sun
• The effects of ${}^{22}$Ne sedimentation and metallicity on the local 40 pc white dwarf luminosity function
• Stellar cooling anomalies and variant axion models
• The White Dwarfs of the Old, Solar Metallicity Open Star Cluster Messier 67: Properties and Progenitors
• The White Dwarf Luminosity Functions from the Pan-STARRS 1 3π Steradian Survey
• Towards a fully consistent Milky Way disk model -- IV. The impact of Gaia DR2 and APOGEE
• The kinematics of Galactic disc white dwarfs in Gaia DR2
• A population synthesis study of the luminosity function of hot white dwarfs
• First discovery of an ultra-cool white dwarf benchmark in common proper motion with an M dwarf
• The effects of metallicity on the Galactic disk population of white dwarfs
• Identification of new nearby white dwarfs using Gaia DR3
• The population of single and binary white dwarfs of the Galactic bulge
• Gravity modes on rapidly rotating accreting white dwarfs and their variation after dwarf novae
• The effects of unresolved double-degenerates in the white dwarf luminosity function
• Maximizing Survey Volume for Large-Area Multi-Epoch Surveys with Voronoi Tessellation
• Exploring faint white dwarfs and the luminosity function with Subaru HSC and SDSS in Stripe 82
• A new method to retrieve the star formation history from white dwarf luminosity functions -- an application to the Gaia catalogue of nearby stars