The star formation history in the solar neighborhood as told by massive white dwarfs

Understand

White dwarfs are the remnants of low and intermediate mass stars.

• Because of electron degeneracy, their evolution is just a simple gravothermal process of cooling.
• Recently, thanks to Gaia data, it has been possible to construct the luminosity function of massive (0.9 < M/Msun < 1.1) white dwarfs in the solar neighborhood (d < 100 pc).
• Since the lifetime of their progenitors is very short, the birth times of both, parents and daughters, are very close and allow to reconstruct the (effective) star formation rate.