An Empirical Measurement of the Initial-Final Mass Relation with Gaia White Dwarfs

Understand

We use data from Gaia DR2 to constrain the initial-final mass relation (IFMR) for field stars with initial masses $0.9 \lesssim m_{\rm in}/M_{\odot} \lesssim 8$.

• Precise parallaxes have revealed unprecedented substructure in the white dwarf (WD) cooling sequence on the color-magnitude diagram (CMD).
• Some of this substructure stems from the diversity of WD atmospheric compositions, but the CMD remains bimodal even when only spectroscopically-confirmed DA WDs are considered.
• We develop a generative model to predict the CMD for DA WDs as a function of the initial mass function (IMF), stellar age distribution, and a flexibly parameterized IFMR.