The most massive pulsating white dwarf stars

Massive pulsating white dwarf stars are extremely rare, because of their small size and because they are the final product of high-mass stars, which are less common. Because of their intrinsic smaller size, they are fainter than the normal size white dwarf stars. The motivation to look for this type of stars is to be able to study in detail their internal structure and also derive generic properties for the sub-class of variables, the massive ZZ Ceti stars. Our goal is to investigate whether the internal structures of these stars differ from the lower-mass ones, which in turn could have been resultant from the previous evolutionary stages.

In this paper, we present the ensemble seismological analysis of the known massive pulsating white dwarf stars. Some of these pulsating stars might have substantial crystallized cores, which would allow us to probe solid physics in extreme conditions.