Testing the mass-radius relation of white dwarfs in common proper motion pairs I.Hydrogen-dominated atmospheres

Abstract: The main goal of this work was to measure the masses and radii of white dwarfs that belong to widely separated, common proper motion binaries with non-degenerate companions. These can be assessed, independently from theoretical mass-radius relations, through measurements of gravitational redshifts and photometric radii. We studied 50 white dwarfs with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres, performing a detailed analysis of high-resolution (R ~ 18,500) spectra by means of state-of-the-art grids of synthetic models and specialized software. Hence, we measured accurate radial velocities from the H-alpha and H-beta line-cores, thus obtaining the white dwarf gravitational redshifts. Jointly with a photometric analysis that is formalized by a Bayesian inference method, we measured precise white dwarf radii that allowed us to directly measure the white dwarf masses from their gravitational redshifts. The distributions of measured masses and radii agree within 6% (at the 1-sigma level) from the theoretical mass-radius relation, thus delivering a much smaller scatter in comparison with previous analyses that used gravitational redshift measurements from low-resolution spectra. A comparison against model-dependent spectroscopic estimates produces a larger scatter of 15% on the mass determinations. We find an agreement within ~10% from previous model-based, photometric mass estimates from the literature. Combining gravitational redshift measurements and photometric analysis of white dwarfs delivers precise and accurate, empirical estimates of their masses and radii. This work confirms the reliability of the theoretical mass-radius relation from the lightest to the heaviest white dwarfs in our sample (0.38-1.3 Msun). [abridged]