A new kind of pulsator in the DB valley of white dwarf stars

Abstract

Recent systematic surveys providing massive datasets of white dwarf stars show that there is still a deficit of a factor of 2.5 in the ratio of white dwarfs showing helium absorption lines to those with hydrogen absorption lines in the temperature range 30 000 K T eff < 45 000 K. Since all white dwarfs have to evolve through this temperature range along similar sequences in the color-magnitude diagram, this implies that most of the helium atmosphere white dwarfs evolve into hydrogen atmosphere hot DA stars in that temperature range and then back again to helium atmosphere white dwarfs. I describe possible scenarios for this chameleon-like disguises of white dwarfs with helium dominant atmospheres and a new kind of pulsating white dwarfs predicted to appear near the lower end of the temperature range 45 000–30 000 K from these scenarios. Recently searches have discovered a pulsating DA white dwarf, WD1017−138, in the predicted temperature range. This discovery opens the possibility of a direct test of the explanation for the deficit of helium atmosphere white dwarfs at these temperatures by asteroseismic probing of the atmospheric layers of the hot DAV stars.