The white dwarf binary pathways survey -- X. Gaia orbits for known UV excess binaries

TL;DR

This study uses Gaia DR3 data and UV excess catalogs to identify and characterize 206 white dwarf binaries with F, G, or K companions, revealing diverse orbital periods and insights into their evolutionary histories.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive orbital period and mass measurements for a large sample of white dwarf binaries using Gaia data combined with spectral energy distribution fitting.

Findings

White dwarf binaries have orbital periods from less than a day to hundreds of days.

Many systems are likely post-stable mass transfer binaries.

Some systems challenge standard binary evolution models.

Abstract

White dwarfs with a F, G or K type companion represent the last common ancestor for a plethora of exotic systems throughout the galaxy, though to this point very few of them have been fully characterised in terms of orbital period and component masses, despite the fact several thousand have been identified. Gaia data release 3 has examined many hundreds of thousands of systems, and as such we can use this, in conjunction with our previous UV excess catalogues, to perform spectral energy distribution fitting in order to obtain a sample of 206 binaries likely to contain a white dwarf, complete with orbital periods, and either a direct measurement of the component masses for astrometric systems, or a lower limit on the component masses for spectroscopic systems. Of this sample of 206, four have previously been observed with Hubble Space Telescope spectroscopically in the ultraviolet, which has confirmed the presence of a white dwarf, and we find excellent agreement between the dynamical and spectroscopic masses of the white dwarfs in these systems. We find that white dwarf plus F, G or K binaries can have a wide range of orbital periods, from less than a day to many hundreds of days. A large number of our systems are likely post-stable mass transfer systems based on their mass/period relationships, while others are difficult to explain either via stable mass transfer or standard common envelope evolution.