A new method to retrieve the star formation history from white dwarf luminosity functions – an application to the <i>Gaia</i> catalogue of nearby stars

ABSTRACT With the state-of-the-art Gaia astrometry, the number of confirmed white dwarfs has reached a few hundred thousand. We have reached the era where small features in the white dwarf luminosity function (WDLF) of the solar neighbourhood can be resolved. We demonstrate how to apply Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling on a set of pre-computed partial-WDLFs to derive the star formation history of their progenitor stellar populations. We compare the results against many published works using various types of stars, including white dwarfs, main sequence stars, sub-giants, and the entire stellar population. We find convincing agreements among most of the methods for the broad features in the star formation history, particularly at the intermediate age of 0.1–9 Gyr.