The effects of metallicity on the Galactic disk population of white dwarfs

TL;DR

This study investigates how metallicity influences the white dwarf luminosity function in the Galactic disk, finding that the luminosity function's shape and cutoff are largely unaffected by metallicity evolution, making it a reliable age indicator.

Contribution

It introduces a population synthesis model incorporating recent white dwarf cooling sequences and assesses metallicity's impact, showing the luminosity function's robustness for age determination.

Findings

The white dwarf luminosity function's shape is insensitive to metallicity evolution.

The cutoff position of the luminosity function reliably indicates the Galactic disk's age.

Theoretical results agree well with SDSS and SSS observational data.

Abstract

It has been known for a long time that stellar metallicity plays a significant role in the determination of the ages of the different Galactic stellar populations, when main sequence evolutionary tracks are employed. Here we analyze the role that metallicity plays on the white dwarf luminosity function of the Galactic disk, which is often used to determine its age. We employ a Monte Carlo population synthesis code that accounts for the properties of the population of Galactic disk white dwarfs. Our code incorporates the most up-to-date evolutionary cooling sequences for white dwarfs with hydrogen-rich and hydrogen-deficient atmospheres for both carbon-oxygen and oxygen-neon cores. We use two different models to assess the evolution of the metallicity, one in which the adopted metallicity is constant with time, but with a moderate dispersion, and a second one in which the metallicity increases with time. We found that our theoretical results are in a very satisfactory agreement with the observational luminosity functions obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey (SSS), independently of the adopted age-metallicity law. In particular, we found that the age-metallicity law has no noticeable impact in shaping the bright branch of the white dwarf luminosity function, and that the position of its cut-off is almost insensitive to the adopoted age-metallicity relationship. Because the shape of the bright branch of the white dwarf luminosity function is insensitive to the age-metallicity law, it can be safely employed to test the theoretical evolutionary sequences, while due to the limited sensitivity of the position of the drop-off to the distribution of metallicities, its location provides a robust indicator of the age of the Galactic disk.