White Dwarfs as Probes of the Evolution of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way and the Expanding Universe

This program is motivated by the recent observational insights concerning white dwarfs as individuals and as a population, based on the astrometry from Gaia and large photometric (Kepler, TESS, ZTF, VeraRubin) and spectroscopic (SDSS-V, DESI, WEAVE, 4MOST) surveys. Some of the questions that these data, combined with improved input physics and white dwarf models, will answer are: How does crystallization affect white dwarf cooling? How good is our understanding of convection, overshoot, and mixing in general? How good are the predictions of the low-frequency gravitational wave foreground and thermonuclear supernovae rates (SN Ia, Iax, Ca transients)? What is the nature of the recently discovered stellar remnants of thermonuclear supernova and/or their donors? What are the architectures of planetary systems that survive the metamorphosis of their host stars into white dwarfs, and what is their ultimate fate?