Abstract
I was working in my office at the University of Rochester one afternoon in 1969 when the telephone rang. When I answered, the caller identified himself as Jim Kemp, a physicist from the University of Oregon. He had recently shown that the continuum emission from a star with a strong magnetic field should be circularly polarized, and he had confirmed the effect with a simple laboratory experiment. Now he was interested in looking for stars that might actually display this phenomenon, and white dwarfs seemed likely candidates to possess strong enough magnetic fields to make this possible.
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Notes
- 1.
Kemp, James C., et al. 1970, Astrophys. J., 161, L77, “Discovery of Circularly Polarized Light from a White Dwarf.”
- 2.
For comparison, the strength of the field at Earth’s magnetic poles is only about two-thirds of one gauss, while the field strength may exceed 10,000 gauss (=10 kilogauss = 10 kG) at the poles of a strong permanent magnet.
- 3.
Angel, J. R. P., and Landstreet, J. D. 1970, Astrophys. J., 160, L147, “Magnetic Observations of White Dwarfs.” See also Angel, J. R. P. 1978, Ann. Revs. Astron. Astrophys., 16, 487, “Magnetic White Dwarfs” and Angel, J. R. P., Borra, E. F., and Landstreet, J. D. 1981, Astrophys. J. Suppl., 45, 457, “The Magnetic Fields of White Dwarfs.”
- 4.
Garstang, R. H., and Kemic, S. B. 1974, Astrophys. Space Sci., 31, 103, “Hydrogen and Helium Spectra in Large Magnetic Fields.” See also Kemic, S. B. 1974, Astrophys. J., 193, 213, “Hydrogen and Helium Features in Magnetic White Dwarfs.”
- 5.
Liebert, J., et al. 1977, Astrophys. J., 214, 457, “Feige 7: A Hot, Rotating Magnetic White Dwarf.”
- 6.
Greenstein, J. L. 1984, Astrophys. J., 281, L47, “The Identification of Hydrogen in Grw +70° 8247.”
- 7.
Wickramasinghe, D. T., and Ferrario, Lilia 2000, Publ. Astron. Soc. Pacific, 112, 873, “Magnetism in Isolated and Binary White Dwarfs.”
- 8.
Merani, N., Main, J., and Wunner, G. 1995, Astron. & Astrophys., 298, 193, “Balmer and Paschen Bound-Free Opacities for Hydrogen in Strong White Dwarf Magnetic Fields.”
- 9.
Martin, B., and Wickramasinghe, D. T. 1979, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 189, 883, “Solutions for Radiative Transfer in Magnetic Atmospheres.”
- 10.
Wickramasinghe, D. T., and Martin, B. 1986, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 223. 323, “Magnetic Blanketing in White Dwarfs.”
- 11.
Martin, B., and Wickramasinghe, D. T. 1978, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 183. 533, “A Dipole Model for Magnetic White Dwarf BPM 25114.”
- 12.
Schmidt, G. D., et al. 1986, Astrophys. J., 309, 218, “The New Magnetic White Dwarf PG 1034 + 234: Polarization and Field Structures at More than 500 Million Gauss.”
- 13.
Wickramasinghe, D. T., and Ferrario, Lilia 1988, Astrophys. J., 327, 222, “A Centered Dipole Model for the High Magnetic Field White Dwarf Grw +70° 8247.”
- 14.
See Chap. 15.
- 15.
Wickramasinghe, D. T., and Ferrario, L. 2005, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 356, 1576, “The Origin of the Magnetic Fields in White Dwarfs.”
- 16.
Cowling, T. G. 1945, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 105, 166, “On the Sun’s General Magnetic Field.”
- 17.
Ferrario, Lilia, et al. 1997, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 292, 205, “EUVE J0317-855: A Rapidly Rotating, High-Field Magnetic White Dwarf.”
- 18.
Ferrario, L., and Wickramasinghe, D. T. 2005, Mon. Not. Roy. Astron. Soc., 356, 615, “Magnetic Fields and Rotation in White Dwarfs and Neutron Stars.”
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Blackman, Eric G., et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 485, “Dynamos in Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars as the Origin of Magnetic Fields Shaping Planetary Nebulae.”
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Van Horn, H.M. (2015). Magnetic Personalities. In: Unlocking the Secrets of White Dwarf Stars. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09369-7_19
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