Description
Gaia continues to provide excellent observations of white dwarfs with unparalled precision, accuracy, and sample size. This allows us to revisit methods of inferring the star formation history (SFH) of the solar neighbourhood using white dwarfs. The absolute Gaia G magnitude distribution of white dwarfs and the white dwarf luminosity function are expected to have a dependence on the underlying SFH of the population. Age calculations for individual white dwarfs can also construct a SFH directly by revealing the formation times of the population. We have applied these three methods to the Gaia 40pc white dwarf sample to investigate the underlying SFH.
I will present our recent analysis on the 40 pc sample of white dwarfs and discuss the best fitting SFH from the three different methods. I will also also discuss which of our systematic uncertainties on astrophysical relations we believe should be improved next to further aid modelling the local population. Finally, I will show preliminary results of how our analysis is being expanded to a 100 pc volume.
While the three methods all prefer slightly different SFHs, all agree with a constant SFH within systematic errors. The largest sources of these systematic errors are uncertainties on white dwarf cooling ages, the local stellar metallicity distribution, and the treatment of mergers.
