Pulsating White Dwarf Stars and Precision Asteroseismology

By D. Winget, S. O. Kepler. 2008

279 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Galactic history is written in the white dwarf stars. Their surface properties hint at interiors composed of matter under extreme conditions. In the forty years since their discovery, pulsating white dwarf stars have moved from side-show curiosities to center stage as important tools for unraveling the deep mysteries of the Universe. Innovative observational techniques and theoretical modeling tools have breathed life into precision asteroseismology. We are just learning to use this powerful tool, confronting theoretical models with observed frequencies and their time rate-of-change. With this tool, we calibrate white dwarf cosmochronology; we explore equations of state; we measure stellar masses, rotation rates, and nuclear reaction rates; we explore the physics of interior crystallization; we study the structure of the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae, and we test models of dark matter. The white dwarf pulsations are at once the heartbeat of galactic history and a window into unexplored and exotic physics.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc9b66abe2173bf8d3ef782ea48e3791d59c1ac9

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Podsiadlowski
2. T. Tauris
3. N. Langer
4. L. Althaus
5. M. M. Bertolami
6. B. Gänsicke
7. A. Córsico
8. Jordi Isern

In Instrumentation

1. N. Langer
2. M. Miller
3. Jonathan M. Miller
4. R. Rich
5. P.-E. Tremblay
6. T. Tauris
7. R. Propris
8. P. Podsiadlowski

Citations in the corpus

• Evolutionary and pulsational properties of white dwarf stars (2010, background): “For recent excellent reviews about pulsating white dwarf stars we refer the reader to the papers of Winget & Kepler (2008) and Fontaine & Brassard (2008).”
• OUR MILKY WAY AS A PURE-DISK GALAXY—A CHALLENGE FOR GALAXY FORMATION (2010, background): “How did our Galaxy grow so large with no observational sign that it suffered a major merger after the time 9 – 10 Gyr ago (e.g. Winget & Kepler 2008) when the first disk stars formed?”
• NEW COOLING SEQUENCES FOR OLD WHITE DWARFS (2010, background): “Recent reviews on the properties and evolution of white dwarfs, and of their applications are those of Winget & Kepler (2008) and Fontaine & Brassard (2008).”
• The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, methodology): “Other techniques are sometimes applied; for example, asteroseismology has been used to find the masses of some white dwarfs, main sequence stars, and giants [85, 86, 87, 88].”
• Ultra-stripped supernovae: progenitors and fate (2015, background): “If such a WD were to undergo pulsations (Winget & Kepler 2008), one might be able to verify its structure observationally.”
• White Dwarf Rotation as a Function of Mass and a Dichotomy of Mode Line Widths: Kepler Observations of 27 Pulsating DA White Dwarfs through K2 Campaign 8 (2017, background): “The roughly 2–20 minute flux variations are known to result from surface temperature changes caused by non-radial g-mode pulsations excited by surface convection (see reviews by Fontaine & Brassard 2008; Winget & Kepler 2008; Althaus et al. 2010).”
• The Ages of Stars (2007, background): “This subject has been well reviewed elsewhere (Koester (2002), von Hippel (2005), Winget & Kepler (2008), Salaris (2009)) and so only a few comments will be made here.”