The star formation history of Gaia white dwarf population through its colour-magnitude diagram

Abstract

White dwarfs are the most common stellar remnants. Furthermore, as being old objects, their study could shed new light on different questions related to the history, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Despite these objects have been broadly studied from a theoretical point of view, the observational data has been limited to a poor statistical sample, due to the intrinsic low luminosity of white dwarfs. However, thanks to the recent Gaia EDR3, for the first time, a significant sample of the White dwarf population of our Galaxy, containing around 13,000 objects up to 100 pc from the Sun, has been obtained. Such data, in particular its color-magnitude diagram, provides the ideal scenario for extracting the maximum information. This communication reports a work-in-progress of a widely applied technique for recovering the star formation history of galaxies through its color-magnitude diagram applied, in this case, for first time to the local White dwarf population.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

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