1211.5709 (S. O. Kepler et al.)

Magnetic White Dwarf Stars in the SDSS    [PDF]

S. O. Kepler, Ingrid Pelisoli, Stefan Jordan, Scot J. Kleinman, Baybars Kulebi, Detlev Koester, Viviane Peçanha, Bárbara G. Castanheira, Atsuko Nitta, José Eduardo da Silveira Costa, Don Earl Winget, Antonio Kanaan, Luciano Fraga

To obtain a better statistics on the occurrence of magnetism among white dwarfs, we searched the spectra of the hydrogen atmosphere white dwarf stars (DAs) in the Data Release 7 of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) for Zeeman splittings and estimated the magnetic fields. We found 521 DAs with detectable Zeeman splittings, with fields in the range from around 1 MG to 733 MG, which amounts to 4% of all DAs observed. As the SDSS spectra have low signal-to-noise ratios, we carefully investigated by simulations with theoretical spectra how reliable our detection of magnetic field was.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.5709