Highly magnetized white dwarfs: implications and current status

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, we have been developing the possible existence of highly magnetized white dwarfs with analytical stellar structure models. While the primary aim was to explain the nature of the peculiar overluminous type Ia supernovae, later on, these magnetized stars were found to have even wider ranging implications including those for white dwarf pulsars, soft gamma-ray repeaters and anomalous X-ray pulsars, as well as gravitational radiation. In particular, we have explored in detail the mass-radius relations for these magnetized stars and showed that they can be significantly different from the Chandrasekhar predictions which essentially leads to a new super-Chandrasekhar mass-limit. Recently, using the stellar evolution code STARS, we have successfully modelled their formation and cooling evolution directly from the magnetized main sequence progenitor stars. Here we briefly discuss all these findings and conclude with their current status in the scientific community.