Comparison of theoretical white dwarf cooling timescales

Understand

An accurate assessment of white dwarf cooling times is paramount to place white dwarf cosmochronology of Galactic populations on more solid grounds.

• This issue is particularly relevant in view of the enhanced observational capabilities provided by the next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes, that will offer more avenues to employ white dwarfs as probes of Galactic evolution and test-beds of fundamental physics.
• We estimate for the first time the consistency of results obtained from two independent and widely used evolutionary codes (BaSTI and LPCODE) for white dwarf models with fixed mass and chemical stratification, when the same input physics is employed in both codes.
• We considered 0.55Msun white dwarf models with both pure carbon and uniform carbon-oxygen (50/50 mass fractions) core.