Bibcode
DOI
Castellani, V.; Luridiana, V.; Romaniello, M.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 428, no. 2, pt. 1, p. 633-637
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6
1994
Journal
Citations
18
Refereed citations
16
Description
The evolutionary scenario concerning the production and the cooling of
He white dwarfs is revisited and discussed. We show that, for a given
star metallicity, the minimum mass of H-rich envelopes able to support a
red giant structure linearly decreases when the logarithm of the red
giant luminosity increases. Increasing the metallicity the mass of this
critical envelope decreases. We found that below the upper mass limit
for the production of He white dwarfs there exists a rather large
interval of masses which, if diffusion is neglected, are expected to
cool down quietly, substantially supported by residual pp burning in the
stellar envelope and with evolutionary times larger than similar times
for CO dwarfs. Under the above quoted assumption, only less massive
stars will begin to suffer CNO burning instabilities during the cooling.
An increase in the star metallicity acts in the sense of increasing the
stability of the structure against the occurrence of CNO flashes.
Theoretical constraint concerning the possible occurrence of He dwarfs
in galactic globular clusters are finally discussed, showing that even a
10% of quietly cooling dwarf could give a not negligible contribution to
white dwarf (WD) cooling sequence to be observed in the clusters.