Isolated Magnetic White Dwarf Stars: A Search for Low Fields and Offset Dipole Models for High Fields

Previous abstract Next abstract

Session 90 -- Planetary Nebula and Degenerate Stars
Oral presentation, Wednesday, 11, 1995, 10:00am - 11:30am

[90.04D] Isolated Magnetic White Dwarf Stars: A Search for Low Fields and Offset Dipole Models for High Fields

Angela Putney (California Institute of Technology)

The magnetic field evidently survives stellar evolution through to the white dwarf stage, but this is not well understood. With the aid of circular spectropolarimetry, the understanding of the white dwarf magnetic field is improving. The work presented here consists of two projects. The first is a survey of 51 isolated DC white dwarf stars searching for magnetic field strengths $> 5\times10^5$ G. The survey is not yet complete, however, several objects have proven interesting, for example G~183-35 has a magnetic field of $\sim 7\times 10^6$ G and G~158-45 (LHS~1044) shows evidence of rotation. The second project consists of running the magnetic white dwarf modelling code of S. Jordan of the University of Kiel to compare models of circular polarization and flux spectra to observational data of G~99-47, \hbox{G~227-35}, and KUV~813-14. All three stars are best fit with offset dipole or dipole+quadrupole fields.

Wednesday program listing