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We report the spectroscopic confirmation of four further white dwarf members of Praesepe. This brings the total number of confirmed white dwarf members to eleven making this the second largest collection of these objects in an open cluster identified to date. This number is consistent with the high mass end of the initial mass function of Praesepe being Salpeter in form. Furthermore, it suggests that the bulk of Praesepe white dwarfs did not gain a substantial recoil kick velocity from possible asymmetries in their loss of mass during the asymptotic giant branch phase of evolution. By comparing our estimates of the effective temperatures and the surface gravities of WD0833+194, WD0840+190, WD0840+205 and WD0843+184 to modern theoretical evolutionary tracks we have derived their masses to be in the range 0.72-0.76Msun and their cooling ages ~300Myrs. For an assumed cluster age of 625+/-50Myrs the infered progenitor masses are between 3.3-3.5Msun. Examining these new data in the context of the initial mass-final mass relation we find that it can be adequately represented by a linear function (a0=0.289+/-0.051, a1=0.133+/-0.015) over the initial mass range 2.7Msun to 6Msun. Assuming an extrapolation of this relation to larger initial masses is valid and adopting a maximum white dwarf mass of 1.3Msun, our results support a minimum mass for core-collapse supernovae progenitors in the range ~6.8-8.6Msun.
We present the preliminary results of a survey of the open clusters NGC3532 and NGC2287 for new white dwarf members which can help improve understanding of the form of the upper end of the stellar initial mass-final mass relation. We identify four ob
The initial-final mass relation (IFMR) represents the total mass lost by a star during the entirety of its evolution from the zero age main sequence to the white dwarf cooling track. The semi-empirical IFMR is largely based on observations of DA whit
Axion-like particles (ALPs), a class of pseudoscalars common to many extensions of the Standard Model, have the capacity to drain energy from the interiors of stars. Consequently, stellar evolution can be used to derive many constraints on ALPs. We s
We present the first detailed photometric and spectroscopic study of the white dwarfs (WDs) in the field of the ~225 Myr old (log tau_cl = 8.35) open cluster NGC 1039 (M34) as part of the ongoing Lick-Arizona White Dwarf Survey. Using wide-field UBV
The initial-final mass relation represents a mapping between the mass of a white dwarf remnant and the mass that the hydrogen burning main-sequence star that created it once had. The relation thus far has been constrained using a sample of ~40 stars