The HST Large Programme on NGC 6752. III. Detection of the Peak of the White Dwarf Luminosity Function

Abstract

We report on the white dwarf cooling sequence of the old globular cluster NGC 6752, which is chemically complex and hosts a blue horizontal branch. This is one of the last globular cluster white dwarf (WD) cooling sequences accessible to imaging by the Hubble Space Telescope. Our photometry and completeness tests show that we have reached the peak of the luminosity function of the WD cooling sequence, at a magnitude m_F606W=29.4+/-0.1, which is consistent with a formal age of ~14Gyr. This age is also consistent with the age from fits to the main-sequence turnoff (13-14Gyr), reinforcing our conclusion that we observe the expected accumulation of white dwarfs along the cooling sequence.

10 pages, 1 table, 5 figures (3 in low resolution). Accepted for publication in MNRAS on 2019, July 12. Associated RGB-cube-WCS-fits file at https://web.oapd.inaf.it/bedin/files/PAPERs_eMATERIALs/NGC6752_III/NGC6752_RGB_WCS.fits.bz2

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• Slowly cooling white dwarfs in M13 from stable hydrogen burning
• The HST large programme on $\omega$ Centauri -- V. Exploring the Ultracool Dwarf Population with Stellar Atmosphere and Evolutionary Modelling
• The HST large programme on NGC 6752 -- IV. The White Dwarf Sequence
• Ne22 distillation and the cooling sequence of the old metal-rich open cluster NGC 6791
• New Way to Date Globular Clusters: Brown Dwarf Cooling Sequences