White Dwarf Cosmochronology in the Solar Neighborhood

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method to determine the star formation history of the Milky Way's solar neighborhood using local white dwarf data, providing insights into the galaxy's early evolution.

Contribution

A novel technique that directly infers the formation history from nearby white dwarfs, improving age estimates and revealing recent star formation enhancements.

Findings

Enhanced star formation in the last 5 Gyr.

Oldest white dwarfs indicate a ~10 Gyr age for the Galactic disk.

Method can be applied to larger samples in future studies.

Abstract

The study of the stellar formation history in the solar neighborhood is a powerful technique to recover information about the early stages and evolution of the Milky Way. We present a new method which consists of directly probing the formation history from the nearby stellar remnants. We rely on the volume complete sample of white dwarfs within 20 pc, where accurate cooling ages and masses have been determined. The well characterized initial-final mass relation is employed in order to recover the initial masses (1 < M/Msun < 8) and total ages for the local degenerate sample. We correct for moderate biases that are necessary to transform our results to a global stellar formation rate, which can be compared to similar studies based on the properties of main-sequence stars in the solar neighborhood. Our method provides precise formation rates for all ages except in very recent times, and the results suggest an enhanced formation rate for the solar neighborhood in the last 5 Gyr compared to the range 5 < Age (Gyr) < 10. Furthermore, the observed total age of ~10 Gyr for the oldest white dwarfs in the local sample is consistent with the early seminal studies that have determined the age of the Galactic disk from stellar remnants. The main shortcoming of our study is the small size of the local white dwarf sample. However, the presented technique can be applied to larger samples in the future.