The initial-final mass relationship of white dwarfs revisited: effect on the luminosity function and mass distribution

Understand

The initial-final mass relationship connects the mass of a white dwarf with the mass of its progenitor in the main-sequence.

• Although this function is of fundamental importance to several fields in modern astrophysics, it is not well constrained either from the theoretical or the observational points of view.
• In this work we revise the present semi-empirical initial-final mass relationship by re-evaluating the available data.
• The distribution obtained from grouping all our results presents a considerable dispersion, which is larger than the uncertainties.