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.