Bibcode
Castanheira, Barbara; Winget, D.; Gebhardt, K.; Allende-Prieto, C.; Shetrone, M.; Odewahn, S.; Montgomery, M. H.
Bibliographical reference
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #424.08
Advertised on:
1
2012
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
In this poster, we present the project that will survey all white dwarf
stars observed in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment
(HETDEX) and the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph
(VIRUS) observations in parallel mode. The final product will be a
unique magnitude-limited catalog of as many as 10,000 stars. Since we
will use data from an Integral-field Units, our survey will be free of
the selection biases that plagued preceding surveys, e.g. the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The critical advantages of our program are
our ability to produce a white dwarf luminosity function five magnitudes
fainter than the one derived from the Palomar-Green survey and with a
similar number of faint stars as the one from SDSS. Our project will
help to derive a more precise age of the Galactic disk, and will provide
fundamental information about the white dwarf population and the star
formation history of the Milky Way, impacting the white dwarf field and
many other fields of astronomy.