How much mass does a star lose during its lifetime?
That deceptively simple question sits at the heart of stellar astrophysics. Every star sheds material as it evolves, but measuring exactly how much has proven surprisingly difficult. In our new paper, The White Dwarf Initial-Final Mass Relation from Open Clusters in Gaia DR3, we leverage the unprecedented precision of Gaia Data Release 3 to construct one of the most comprehensive measurements yet of the relationship between a star’s birth mass and the mass of its white dwarf remnant.
White dwarfs are the final evolutionary stage for more than 95% of stars in our Galaxy, including our Sun. By studying white dwarfs in open star clusters, we can estimate the mass of the original star and compare it with the mass of the remnant that remains.
Using Gaia’s exquisitely accurate distances and motions, we identified and characterized white dwarfs belonging to numerous open clusters. The resulting sample provides new constraints on the Initial-Final Mass Relation (IFMR), a key ingredient in models of stellar evolution, galactic archaeology, and chemical enrichment.
Our findings reveal a more detailed picture of how stars lose mass over billions of years and provide an improved foundation for understanding the future fate of stars like the Sun.
Paper Information
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae18c8
ADS: Abstract and citation record