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A lower limit of 9.5 Gyr on the age of the Galactic disk from the oldest white dwarf stars

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Abstract

WHITE dwarf stars represent the final evolutionary state for most main-sequence stars. They cool slowly enough that even the oldest white dwarfs are still observable in sufficiently deep surveys and they therefore provide a record of the age and star-formation history of the local disk of the Milky Way1–7—and hence a useful constraint on the age of the Galaxy itself. Here we report the initial results of a very deep survey of white dwarfs, that avoids many of the problems associated with the incompleteness of earlier surveys. We use model age–luminosity relations to interpret the luminosity function of our sample of stars, and thus obtain a minimum age for the local Galactic disk of ∼9.5 Gyr. Our results lend weight to an emerging picture of the evolutionary history of the Milky Way, in which the halo formed ∼14–17 Gyr ago8,9, followed by the bulge globular clusters ∼12–14 Gyr ago10, with a modest hiatus before the onset of star formation in the local disk ∼10 Gyr ago.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Space Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Florida, 32901-6988, USA

    Terry D. Oswalt, J. Allyn Smith & Matt A. Wood

  2. Department of Physics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, 89154, USA

    Paul Hintzen

  3. Laboratory for Astronomy and Solar Physics, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, 20771, USA

    Paul Hintzen

  4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, California State University, Long Beach, California, 90840-3901, USA

    Paul Hintzen

Authors
  1. Terry D. Oswalt
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  2. J. Allyn Smith
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  3. Matt A. Wood
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  4. Paul Hintzen
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Oswalt, T., Smith, J., Wood, M. et al. A lower limit of 9.5 Gyr on the age of the Galactic disk from the oldest white dwarf stars. Nature 382, 692–694 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1038/382692a0

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