Computer Science
Scientific paper
Aug 1996
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1996natur.382..692o&link_type=abstract
Nature, Volume 382, Issue 6593, pp. 692-694 (1996).
Computer Science
152
Scientific paper
WHITE dwarf stars represent the final evolutionary state for most main-sequence stars. They cool slowly enough that even the oldest white dwarfs are still observable in sufficiently deep surveys and they therefore provide a record of the age and star-formation history of the local disk of the Milky Way1-7-and hence a useful constraint on the age of the Galaxy itself. Here we report the initial results of a very deep survey of white dwarfs, that avoids many of the problems associated with the incompleteness of earlier surveys. We use model age-luminosity relations to interpret the luminosity function of our sample of stars, and thus obtain a minimum age for the local Galactic disk of ~9.5 Gyr. Our results lend weight to an emerging picture of the evolutionary history of the Milky Way, in which the halo formed ~14-17 Gyr ago8,9, followed by the bulge globular clusters ~12-14 Gyr ago10, with a modest hiatus before the onset of star formation in the local disk ~10 Gyr ago.
Hintzen Paul
Oswalt Terry D.
Smith Anthony J.
Wood Matt A.
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