Monday, May 20, 2013

1305.3987 (Upasana Das et al.)

New mass limit of white dwarfs    [PDF]

Upasana Das, Banibrata Mukhopadhyay
Is the Chandrasekhar mass limit for white dwarfs (WDs) set in stone? Not anymore --- recent observations of over-luminous, peculiar type~Ia supernovae can be explained if significantly super-Chandrasekhar WDs exist as their progenitors, thus barring them to be used as cosmic distance indicators. However, there is no estimate of a mass limit for these super-Chandrasekhar WD candidates yet. Can they be arbitrarily large? In fact, the answer is no! We arrive at this revelation by exploiting the flux freezing theorem in observed, accreting, magnetized WDs, which brings in Landau quantization of the underlying electron degenerate gas. This essay presents the calculations which pave the way for the ultimate (significantly super-Chandrasekhar) mass limit of WDs, heralding a paradigm shift 80 years after Chandrasekhar's discovery.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3987

No comments:

Post a Comment