Zero Temperature White Dwarfs
26 Mar 2015Any fool can make a white dwarf. — Icko Iben Jr. (via HKT)
I often find it useful to have a table of properities of zero temperature white dwarfs for quick-and-dirty calculations. This table has the mass, radius, and central density (as well as the logarithmic derivatives of those quantities with respect to one another). You can download the Mathematica notebook that generated it.
These models assume an ideal, zero-temperature Fermi gas with an electron fraction of 0.5. If you care about the effects of Coulomb corrections, general relativity, etc., you’ll need to look into more sophisticated models. Frank Timmes has a cold white dwarf code on his website.