Are white dwarfs born with a `KICK'?

The unusually large kinetic energies possessed by some pulsars, as inferred from their observed velocities in excess of the escape speed of the Galaxy, imply that the violent explosions in which they are born impart some fraction of their energy into the motion of the pulsar. Does a similar, but less energetic process occur during the birth of a white dwarf? Two major Hubble Space Telescope imaging campaigns of the two nearest globular star clusters, NGC 6397 and Messier 4, yield the radial distribution of both white dwarfs and main-sequences. Because globular clusters are relaxed populations, the velocity dispersion, and hence radial distribution, for stars of a particular mass is directly dependent on that mass. To first approximation, all white dwarf s have a mass of 0.55 M⊙. If white dwarfs are not born with a kick, we expect white dwarf s of an age younger than a relaxation time to have a radial distribution similar to main-sequence stars of 0.8 M⊙, i.e. the mass of their progenitor. Conversely, if white dwarf s are born with a kick, the radial distribution of white dwarfs younger than the relaxation time should mimic that of main-sequence stars of lesser mass. By comparing the radial distributions of white dwarfs of various ages with those of main-sequence stars of various masses in these two globular clusters, we find that the radial distributions of young white dwarfs are most similar to that of main-sequence stars of 0.2 M⊙, implying a natal kick of >1.6 km/s.