White dwarf stars as particle physics laboratories

Abstract The evolution of white dwarf stars is a simple process of cooling. Since the properties of white dwarfs are relatively well known they can be used as stellar bolometers by comparing the observed rate of change of their temperature with the theoretically derived one. This allows to compare with the observations the rate of cooling that they should have if new physical sources of cooling or heating are included. Here we apply this procedure to bound the mass of the axions and to the rate of change of the gravitational constant.