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Paper: Constraints on the Stellar Parameters of White Dwarf Stars from Asteroseismology
Volume: 479, Progress in Physics of the Sun and Stars
Page: 223
Authors: Vauclair, G.
Abstract: In the last two decades, considerable efforts have been devoted to the study of white dwarf pulsators. Owing to multi-site observational campaigns, and more recently to long time-base high-precision photometric observations with the Kepler satellite, a large number of pulsating white dwarfs have been studied through the asteroseismology method. We emphasize here the accuracy that this method achieves for the determination of the total mass, one of the fundamental stellar parameters that can be derived from asteroseismology. We discuss the issue of the age determination, the contribution of neutrino cooling, and the importance of the outer layer mass fraction. While the asteroseismology of white dwarf stars has given a rich harvest of results on their internal structure and evolution, there are still some challenges to face. Determining an accurate mass of the outer layers, specifically for the DA white dwarfs, is one of them. An increasing number of white dwarf pulsators are now known to exhibit frequency and temporal amplitude variations. The physical mechanism producing such variabilities needs to be identified.
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