White Dwarf Stars in the HET Dark Energy Experiment

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
Number of authors
7
IAC number of authors
1
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.