The Initial-Final Mass Relation Revisited: A Monte Carlo Approach with the Addition of the M67 White Dwarf Population
Abstract
The initial-final mass relation (IFMR) describes how the initial mass of a stellar
object maps to its mass as a remnant. The focus of this work is to re-examine this
relation for low to intermediate mass stars.
Studies of the IFMR have been used in derivations of the age of the galactic
components, to measure the total integrated mass loss from stars, to bound the initial
mass which will form a white dwarf as opposed to a core collapse supernova, and to
study the effects of post-main sequence evolution on exoplanet systems.
Given stellar lifetimes far exceed what we can observe in real time it is impossible
to measure both a star's mass as it once was when it came to be as a star and its mass
as a stellar remnant. For this reason, we look to objects which are white dwarfs (WDs)
to get the latter piece of information and use the fact that they are in clusters of known
age to get the prior piece of information. With both the initial and final mass of the
object in hand it is then possible to fit a function to the data to obtain the IFMR.
This dissertation presents the first spectroscopic analysis of WDs in the aged solar metallicity
open cluster M67, a reanalysis of the M34, M35, NGC6633, and NGC7063
WD samples, and an IFMR from the application of the spectroscopic technique for
deriving WD masses with a Monte Carlo approach to explore the uncertainties in the
initial and final masses in an improved way.
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