Skip to main content

EDITORIAL article

Front. Astron. Space Sci., 02 June 2022
Sec. Stellar and Solar Physics
Volume 9 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fspas.2022.936227
This article is part of the Research Topic White Dwarfs in the Age of the Great Collaborations View all 6 articles

Editorial: White Dwarfs in the Age of the Great Collaborations

Alejandro Hugo Crsico, Alejandro Hugo Córsico1,2*Leandro Gabriel Althaus,Leandro Gabriel Althaus1,2Santiago Torres,Santiago Torres3,4Agns Bischoff-KimAgnès Bischoff-Kim5
  • 1Facultad de Ciencias Astronómicas y Geofísicas, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina
  • 2IALP—CONICET, La Plata, Argentina
  • 3Departament de Física, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Castelldefels, Spain
  • 4Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
  • 5Penn State Worthington Scranton, Dunmore, PA, United States

Editorial on the Research Topic
White Dwarfs in the Age of the Great Collaborations

The white dwarf stars have gained unprecedented interest in the recent years, largely due to theoretical developments in the modeling of their formation and evolution, but mainly due to the advent of large scientific collaborations, in some cases involving observations from the ground, and in other casos including space telescopes. As a matter of fact, photometric and spectroscopic surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Extremely Low Mass (ELM) Survey, the astrometric Gaia mission and the Hubble Space Telescope, have promoted a major revolution in the research of white dwarfs. In the area of stellar variability, the study of white dwarf pulsators in all their flavors has been greatly boosted from space telescopes, such as the already completed Kepler/K2 mission, the ongoing TESS and Cheops missions, and the future PLATO mission, which will be operational in the upcoming years. Space missions have the capability of observing variable white dwarfs during timescales of months in a continuous fashion, allowing the finding of new frequencies of oscillation of already known pulsating white dwarfs, and the discovery of new pulsating objects of this kind.

This brief Research Topic contains articles written by leading researchers in the areas of white dwarf atmospheres, theoretical and observational asteroseismological methods of white dwarfs, applications of white dwarfs as new-physics laboratories, and the particular study of accreting pulsating white dwarfs. We are satisfied with the topics covered, and we are grateful to the authors for their valuable contributions. We hope that these articles will be of great use to researchers in these areas, as well as to researchers in other areas of astrophysics who wish to acquire a brief update on the state-of-the-art in connection with the origin, evolution, internal structure, properties of atmospheres, and gravity-mode pulsations of white dwarfs.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Keywords: white dwarf stars, stellar interiors, stellar evolution, stellar atmospheres, pulsating stars, asteroseismology, space photometry, fourier technique

Citation: Córsico AH, Althaus LG, Torres S and Bischoff-Kim A (2022) Editorial: White Dwarfs in the Age of the Great Collaborations. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 9:936227. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2022.936227

Received: 05 May 2022; Accepted: 10 May 2022;
Published: 02 June 2022.

Edited and reviewed by:

Scott William McIntosh, National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), United States

Copyright © 2022 Córsico, Althaus, Torres and Bischoff-Kim. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Alejandro Hugo Córsico, acorsico@fcaglp.unlp.edu.ar

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.