Ages of White Dwarf Stars
Abstract
We are developing a technique to determine the age of formation of the Galactic thin and thick disks based on the properties of white dwarfs. To achieve this goal, we calculated the U, V, and W velocity components for thousands of white dwarfs with parallaxes and proper motions from Gaia, yet without radial velocities. With a missing component of the space velocity and overlap in the UVW distributions of these three stellar populations, we determine probabilities that each white dwarfs belongs to one of these Galactic populations. We classified 101,418 likely thin disk white dwarfs, 3158 likely thick disk white dwarfs, and six halo candidates. We apply the BASE-9 Astro statistics software to derive ages and masses for each white dwarf, then explore the age distributions for each population.
Ages of White Dwarf Stars
We are developing a technique to determine the age of formation of the Galactic thin and thick disks based on the properties of white dwarfs. To achieve this goal, we calculated the U, V, and W velocity components for thousands of white dwarfs with parallaxes and proper motions from Gaia, yet without radial velocities. With a missing component of the space velocity and overlap in the UVW distributions of these three stellar populations, we determine probabilities that each white dwarfs belongs to one of these Galactic populations. We classified 101,418 likely thin disk white dwarfs, 3158 likely thick disk white dwarfs, and six halo candidates. We apply the BASE-9 Astro statistics software to derive ages and masses for each white dwarf, then explore the age distributions for each population.