An observational overview of white dwarf stars

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive observational overview of white dwarf stars, detailing their identification, characterization, and the insights gained from recent large-scale surveys and spectroscopic data.

Contribution

It offers a synthesis of current observational techniques and findings related to white dwarf stars, highlighting recent advances and the wealth of data from new surveys.

Findings

Identification methods for white dwarfs are evolving with new astrometric data.

Spectroscopic surveys reveal diverse chemical compositions in white dwarf atmospheres.

Large datasets enable statistical analysis of white dwarf properties and evolution.

Abstract

White dwarf stars are the most common final stage of stellar evolution. Since the serendipitous discovery of the first white dwarf by William Herschel and the first physical models by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and Arthur Eddington, there have been a lot of advances in the field fueled by new observational data. With new astrometric measurements enabling us to identify hundreds of thousands of white dwarf candidates, and spectroscopic surveys revealing a plethora of chemical elements in white dwarf atmospheres pointing at spectral evolution and interaction with planetary bodies, there is a lot we can learn from the characterization of observed white dwarfs. Here we provide an observational overview of white dwarf stars, describing how they are identified and characterized, and the main properties of the observed population.