Grids of white dwarf evolutionary models with masses from M= 0.1 to 1.2 Ms

摘要

We present detailed evolutionary calculations for carbon - oxygen - and helium - core white dwarf (WD) models with masses ranging fromM= 0.1 to M= 1.2 solar masses and for metallicities Z= 0.001 and Z= 0. Thesequences cover a wide range of hydrogen envelopes as well. We employed adetailed WD evolutionary code. In particular, the energy transport byconvectcion is treated within the formalism of the full spectrum turbulencetheory. The set of models presented here is very detailed and should bevaluable for the interpretation of the observational data on low - mass WDsrecently discovered in numerous binary configurations and also for the generalproblem of determining the theoretical luminosity function for WDs. In thiscontext, we compare our cooling sequences with the observed WD luminosityfunction recently improved by Leggett, Ruiz and Bergeron (1998) and we obtainan age for the Galactic disc of approximately 8 Gyr. Finally, we applied theresults of this paper to derive stellar masses of a sample of low - mass whitedwarfs.