Paper detail

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

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