When Do Stars Go Boom?
Creators
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1.
University of British Columbia
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2.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
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3.
Space Telescope Science Institute
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4.
Johns Hopkins University
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5.
California Institute of Technology
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6.
Indiana University Bloomington
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7.
University of California, Los Angeles
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8.
University of Warwick
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9.
University of Washington
Abstract
The maximum mass of a star that can produce a white dwarf (WD) is an important astrophysical quantity. One of the best approaches to establishing this limit is to search for WDs in young star clusters in which only massive stars have had time to evolve and where the mass of the progenitor can be established from the cooling time of the WD together with the age of the cluster. Searches in young Milky Way clusters have not thus far yielded WD members more massive than about 1.1 M_⊙, well below the Chandrasekhar mass of 1.38 M_⊙, nor progenitors with masses in excess of about 6 M_⊙. However, the hunt for potentially massive WDs that escaped their cluster environs is yielding interesting candidates. To expand the cluster sample further, we used HST to survey four young and massive star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds for bright WDs that could have evolved from stars as massive as 10 M_⊙. We located five potential WD candidates in the oldest of the four clusters examined, the first extragalactic single WDs thus far discovered. As these hot WDs are very faint at optical wavelengths, final confirmation will likely have to await spectroscopy with 30 m class telescopes.
Additional Information
© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2022 March 7; revised 2022 March 30; accepted 2022 April 7; published 2022 May 30. This work was supported in part by NSERC Canada and Compute Canada via grants to H.R. and J.H. I.C. is a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at Caltech and thanks the Burke Institute at Caltech for supporting her research. Support for this project was provided by NASA through grant HST-GO-13727 from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Facilities: Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555.Attached Files
Published - Richer_2022_ApJL_931_L20.pdf
Accepted Version - 2203.11264.pdf
Files
2203.11264.pdf
Additional details
Identifiers
- Eprint ID
- 114972
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20220531-844238000
Related works
- Describes
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.11264 (URL)
Funding
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)
- Compute Canada
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech
- NASA
- HST-GO-13727
- NASA
- NAS5-26555
Dates
- Created
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2022-06-01Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2022-06-01Created from EPrint's last_modified field
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- TAPIR , Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics