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White dwarfs are stellar embers depleted of nuclear energy sources that cool over billions of years. These stars, which are supported by electron degeneracy pressure, reach densities of 1e7 grams per cubic centimetre in their cores. It has been predicted that a first-order phase transition occurs during white-dwarf cooling, leading to the crystallization of the non-degenerate carbon and oxygen ions in the core, which releases a considerable amount of latent heat and delays the cooling process by about one billion years. However, no direct observational evidence of this effect has been reported so far. Here we report the presence of a pile-up in the cooling sequence of evolving white dwarfs within 100 parsecs of the Sun, determined using photometry and parallax data from the Gaia satellite. Using modelling, we infer that this pile-up arises from the release of latent heat as the cores of the white dwarfs crystallize. In addition to the release of latent heat, we find strong evidence that cooling is further slowed by the liberation of gravitational energy from element sedimentation in the crystallizing cores. Our results describe the energy released by crystallization in strongly coupled Coulomb plasmas, and the measured cooling delays could help to improve the accuracy of methods used to determine the age of stellar populations from white dwarfs.
The evolution of white dwarfs is a simple gravothermal process. This process can be tested in two ways, through the luminosity function of these stars and through the secular variation of the period of pulsation of those stars that are variable. Here
The first solids that form as a cooling white dwarf (WD) starts to crystallize are expected to be greatly enriched in actinides. This is because the melting points of WD matter scale as $Z^{5/3}$ and actinides have the largest charge $Z$. We estimate
Recently, the power of Gaia data has revealed an enhancement of high-mass white dwarfs (WDs) on the Hertzsprung--Russell diagram, called the Q branch. This branch is located at the high-mass end of the recently identified crystallization branch. Inve
We present Hubble Space Telescope data of the low-reddening Sagittarius window in the Galactic bulge. The Sagittarius Window Eclipsing Extrasolar Planet Search field (3x3), together with three more Advanced Camera for Surveys and eight Wide Field Cam
We revisit the problem of the formation of DB white dwarfs, as well as the origin of hydrogen in DBA stars, using a new set of envelope model calculations with stratified and mixed hydrogen/helium compositions. We first describe an approximate model