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Recent surveys of close white dwarf binaries as well as single white dwarfs have provided evidence for the late appearance of magnetic fields in white dwarfs, and a possible generation mechanism a crystallization and rotation-driven dynamo has been suggested. A key prediction of this dynamo is that magnetic white dwarfs rotate, at least on average, faster than their non-magnetic counterparts and/or that the magnetic field strength increases with rotation. Here we present rotation periods of ten white dwarfs within 40 pc measured using photometric variations. Eight of the light curves come from TESS observations and are thus not biased towards short periods, in contrast to most period estimates that have been reported previously in the literature. These TESS spin periods are indeed systematically shorter than those of non-magnetic white dwarfs. This means that the crystallization and rotation-driven dynamo could be responsible for a fraction of the magnetic fields in white dwarfs. However, the full sample of magnetic white dwarfs also contains slowly rotating strongly magnetic white dwarfs which indicates that another mechanism that leads to the late appearance of magnetic white dwarfs might be at work, either in addition to or instead of the dynamo. The fast-spinning and massive magnetic white dwarfs that appear in the literature form a small fraction of magnetic white dwarfs, and probably result from a channel related to white dwarf mergers., Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures, 8 tables, accepted for publication in MNRAS

About half of white dwarfs (WDs) evolve to the DC state as they cool; the others become DQ or (temporarily?) DZ WDs. The recent magnetic survey of the local 20 pc volume has established a high frequency of magnetic fields among WDs older than 2-3 Gyr, demonstrating that in low- and average-mass WDs, the effects of magnetism become more common as they age, and the fields on average become stronger. However, the available statistics of WDs older than about 5 Gyr do not clearly establish how fields evolve beyond this age. We are carrying out a survey to clarify the occurrence of magnetism in DC-type WDs in order to better understand this late evolution. We use broadband filter polarimetry, arguably the most efficient way to detect magnetic fields in featureless WDs via continuum circular polarization. Here we report the discovery of a magnetic field in five DC WDs (of 23 observed), almost doubling the total sample of known magnetic WDs belonging to the DC spectral class., Comment: Accepted by A&A

The presence of a strong magnetic field is a feature common to a significant fraction of degenerate stars, yet little is understood about field origin and evolution. New observational constraints from volume-limited surveys point to a more complex situation than a single mechanism valid for all stars. We show that in high-mass white dwarfs, which are probably the results of mergers, magnetic fields are extremely common and very strong, and appear immediately in the cooling phase. These fields may have been generated by a dynamo active during the merging. Lower mass white dwarfs, which are often the product of single star evolution, are rarely detectably magnetic at birth, but fields appear very slowly, and very weakly, in about a quarter of them. What we may see is an internal field produced in an earlier evolutionary stage that gradually relaxes to the surface from the interior. The frequency and strength of magnetic fields continue to increase to eventually rival those of highly-massive stars, particularly after the stars cool past the start of core crystallisation, an effect that could be responsible for a dynamo mechanism similar to the one that is active in Earth's interior., Comment: Accepted by ApJL