White Dwarf Cosmochronology in the Solar Neighborhood

Abstract

The study of the stellar formation history in the solar neighborhood is a powerful technique to recover information about the early stages and evolution of the Milky Way. We present a new method which consists of directly probing the formation history from the nearby stellar remnants. We rely on the volume complete sample of white dwarfs within 20 pc, where accurate cooling ages and masses have been determined. The well characterized initial-final mass relation is employed in order to recover the initial masses (1 < M/Msun < 8) and total ages for the local degenerate sample. We correct for moderate biases that are necessary to transform our results to a global stellar formation rate, which can be compared to similar studies based on the properties of main-sequence stars in the solar neighborhood. Our method provides precise formation rates for all ages except in very recent times, and the results suggest an enhanced formation rate for the solar neighborhood in the last 5 Gyr compared to the range 5 < Age (Gyr) < 10. Furthermore, the observed total age of ~10 Gyr for the oldest white dwarfs in the local sample is consistent with the early seminal studies that have determined the age of the Galactic disk from stellar remnants. The main shortcoming of our study is the small size of the local white dwarf sample. However, the presented technique can be applied to larger samples in the future.

25 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (10)

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• Found: The missing blue opacity in atmosphere models of cool hydrogen white dwarfs
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• On the Spectral Evolution of Cool, Helium-Atmosphere White Dwarfs: Detailed Spectroscopic and Photometric Analysis of DZ Stars
• Re-visiting the relations: Galactic thin disc age-velocity dispersion relation
• Recovering the star formation rate in the solar neighborhood
• Searching for Earth analogues around the nearest stars: the disk age-metallicity relation and the age distribution in the Solar Neighbourhood
• Spectroscopic Identification of Cool White Dwarfs in the Solar Neighbourhood
• Gaia photometry for white dwarfs
• A Schmidt-Kennicutt law for star formation in the Milky Way disk

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• Pressure-Regulated, Feedback-Modulated Star Formation In Disk Galaxies
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• The Mass and Age Distribution of Halo White Dwarfs in the Canada-France Imaging Survey
• Discovery of a Compact Companion to a Nearby Star
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• Weighing stars from birth to death: mass determination methods across the HRD
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• A new method to retrieve the star formation history from white dwarf luminosity functions -- an application to the Gaia catalogue of nearby stars