White Dwarfs in Common Proper Motion Binary Systems: Mass Distribution and Kinematics

Details White Dwarfs in Common Proper Motion Binary Systems: Mass Distribution and Kinematics White Dwarfs in Common Proper Motion Binary Systems: Mass Distribution and Kinematics

May 2000

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000aas...19513306s&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 195th AAS Meeting, #133.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 32, p.880

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We present the mass distribution, gravitational redshifts, radial velocities, and space motions of white dwarfs in common proper motion binary systems. The mass distribution we derive for the 41 white dwarfs in this study has a mean of 0.68 +/- 0.04 Msun (σ m). This distribution has a slightly larger mean and higher dispersion than most previous studies. We hypothesize that this is due to a higher fraction of cool (average Teff 10,000 K), hence old, white dwarfs in our sample. Our analysis shows that white dwarfs with effective temperatures less than 12,000 K are more massive ( = 0.72 +/- 0.04 Msun) than their hotter counterparts ( = 0.59 +/- 0.05 Msun). Both the mean and individual white dwarf masses we report here are in better agreement with those determined from atmospheric profile fits than with some previous gravitational redshift studies of cool white dwrafs. We believe that measurement biases and weak geocoronal emission lines in the observed spectra may have affected previous gravitational redshift measurements. These have been minimized in our study. A list of complete space motions for 50 cool white dwarfs is presented, derived using radial velocity measurements from their nondegenerate companions. We find that the UVW space motions and dispersions of the common proper motion binaries which contain white dwarf components are consistent with those of old metal-poor disk stars.

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