59 research outputs found
Evolutionary and pulsational properties of white dwarf stars
Abridged. White dwarf stars are the final evolutionary stage of the vast
majority of stars, including our Sun. The study of white dwarfs has potential
applications to different fields of astrophysics. In particular, they can be
used as independent reliable cosmic clocks, and can also provide valuable
information about the fundamental parameters of a wide variety of stellar
populations, like our Galaxy and open and globular clusters. In addition, the
high densities and temperatures characterizing white dwarfs allow to use these
stars as cosmic laboratories for studying physical processes under extreme
conditions that cannot be achieved in terrestrial laboratories. They can be
used to constrain fundamental properties of elementary particles such as axions
and neutrinos, and to study problems related to the variation of fundamental
constants.
In this work, we review the essentials of the physics of white dwarf stars.
Special emphasis is placed on the physical processes that lead to the formation
of white dwarfs as well as on the different energy sources and processes
responsible for chemical abundance changes that occur along their evolution.
Moreover, in the course of their lives, white dwarfs cross different
pulsational instability strips. The existence of these instability strips
provides astronomers with an unique opportunity to peer into their internal
structure that would otherwise remain hidden from observers. We will show that
this allows to measure with unprecedented precision the stellar masses and to
infer their envelope thicknesses, to probe the core chemical stratification,
and to detect rotation rates and magnetic fields. Consequently, in this work,
we also review the pulsational properties of white dwarfs and the most recent
applications of white dwarf asteroseismology.Comment: 85 pages, 28 figures. To be published in The Astronomy and
Astrophysics Revie
The Cosmological Constant
This is a review of the physics and cosmology of the cosmological constant.
Focusing on recent developments, I present a pedagogical overview of cosmology
in the presence of a cosmological constant, observational constraints on its
magnitude, and the physics of a small (and potentially nonzero) vacuum energy.Comment: 50 pages. Submitted to Living Reviews in Relativity
(http://www.livingreviews.org/), December 199
Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology with Gravitational Waves
Gravitational wave detectors are already operating at interesting sensitivity
levels, and they have an upgrade path that should result in secure detections
by 2014. We review the physics of gravitational waves, how they interact with
detectors (bars and interferometers), and how these detectors operate. We study
the most likely sources of gravitational waves and review the data analysis
methods that are used to extract their signals from detector noise. Then we
consider the consequences of gravitational wave detections and observations for
physics, astrophysics, and cosmology.Comment: 137 pages, 16 figures, Published version
<http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2009-2
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