Intermediate-mass Stars Become Magnetic White Dwarfs
Abstract
When a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, it either explodes as a supernova or more quiescently becomes a white dwarf, an object about half the mass of our Sun with a radius of about that of the Earth. About one-fifth of white dwarfs exhibit the presence of magnetic fields, whose origin has long been debated as either the product of previous stages of evolution or of binary interactions. We here report the discovery of two massive and magnetic white-dwarf members of young star clusters in the Gaia second data release (DR2) database, while a third massive and magnetic cluster white dwarf was already reported in a previous paper. These stars are most likely the product of single-star evolution and therefore challenge the merger scenario as the only way to produce magnetic white dwarfs. The progenitor masses of these stars are all above 5 solar masses, and there are only two other cluster white dwarfs whose distances have been unambiguously measured with Gaia and whose progenitors' masses fall in this range. This high incidence of magnetic white dwarfs indicates that intermediate-mass progenitors are more likely to produce magnetic remnants and that a fraction of magnetic white dwarfs forms from intermediate-mass stars.
Additional Information
© 2020. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2020 July 28; revised 2020 September 4; accepted 2020 September 6; published 2020 September 22. We would like to thank Jim Fuller for useful discussions and the suggestion that the ASCC 47 white dwarf may be magnetic. The research was supported by NSERC Canada, the NSF, Compute Canada, a Burke Fellowship at Caltech and a Four-Year Fellowship at UBC. The research leading to these results has also received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program No. 677706 (WD3D). This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia) and is based on observations obtained under program IDs GS-2019B-FT-104 (ASCC 47), GS-2018B-FT-108 (M 47), and GN-2019A-FT-214 (M 39) at the international Gemini Observatory. This work is also based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under program ID 177.D-3023, as part of the VST Photometric Halpha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+,www.vphas.eu and on data from the Pan-STARRS1 Survey (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive. We used the Montreal White Dwarf website (http://www.astro.umontreal.ca/bergeron/CoolingModels), the PARSEC stellar models (http://stev.oapd.inaf.it/cgi-bin/cmd), the MIST stellar models (http://waps.cfa.harvard.edu/MIST), and the VizieR catalog access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (DOI :10.26093/cds/vizier). Facilities: Gaia - , Gemini Observatory(GMOS) - , VLT(VPHAS+ Survey) - , Pan-STARRS(PS1 Survey). - Software: IRAF (Tody 1986).Attached Files
Published - Caiazzo_2020_ApJL_901_L14.pdf
Accepted Version - 2009.03374.pdf
Files
Name | Size | Download all |
---|---|---|
md5:85a76a24641042defd8d7fb4ac39b7de
|
1.0 MB | Preview Download |
md5:bec70152f382395ea45f3380f7665b26
|
1.1 MB | Preview Download |
Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 105564
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200925-135425215
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- NSF
- Compute Canada
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech
- University of British Columbia
- 677706
- European Research Council (ERC)
- Created
-
2020-09-25Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics