Detection of cesium in the atmosphere of the hot He-rich white dwarf HD 149499B

TL;DR

This paper reports the first detection of cesium in the atmosphere of a white dwarf, using spectral analysis and non-LTE models to determine its abundance.

Contribution

It presents the first identification of cesium in a white dwarf's atmosphere and develops new atomic data calculations for spectral analysis.

Findings

Cesium detected in the atmosphere of HD 149499B.

Cesium abundance determined as log N(Cs)/N(He) = -5.45.

New atomic data for Cs IV-VI transitions calculated.

Abstract

We report the first detection of cesium (Z = 55) in the atmosphere of a white dwarf. Around a dozen absorption lines of Cs IV, Cs V, and Cs VI have been identified in the Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer spectrum of the He-rich white dwarf HD 149499B (Teff = 49,500 K, log g = 7.97). The lines have equivalent widths ranging from 2.3 to 26.9 m\r{A}. We performed a spectral synthesis analysis to determine the cesium content in the atmosphere. Non-LTE atmosphere models were computed by considering cesium explicitly in the calculations. For this purpose we calculated oscillator strengths for the bound-bound transitions of Cs IV-Cs VI with both AUTOSTRUCTURE (multiconfiguration Breit-Pauli) and GRASP2K (multiconfiguration Dirac-Fock) atomic structure codes as neither measured nor theoretical values are reported in the literature. We determined a cesium abundance of log N(Cs)/N(He) = -5.45(0.35), which can also be expressed in terms of the mass fraction log X(Cs) = -3.95(0.35).