White dwarfs as physics laboratories: the case of axions

J. ISERN; L. G. ALTHAUS; S. CATALÁN; A. H. CÓRSICO; E. GARCÍA-BERRO; M. SALARIS; S. TORRES

Patras

Workshop; 7th Patras Workshop on Axions, WIMPs and WISPs; 2011

White dwarfs are almost completely degenerate objects that cannot obtain energy fromthermonuclear sources, so their evolution is just a gravothermal cooling process. Recentimprovements in the accuracy and precision of the luminosity function and in pulsationaldata of variable white dwarfs suggest that they are cooling faster then expected fromconventional theory. In this contribution we show that the inclusion of an additionalcooling term due to axions able to interact with electrons with a coupling constant gae (2 − 7) × 10−13 allows to fit better the luminosity function.