2020/07/02 by Nicholas Fantin, Fantin, Nicholas J., Patrick Côté +3
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA) #FOS: Physical sciences #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.01312
openalex publication_date 2020/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
With the imminent start of the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST) on the\nVera C. Rubin Observatory, and several new space telescopes expected to begin\noperations later in this decade, both time domain and wide-field astronomy are\non the threshold of a new era. In this paper, we use a new, multi-component\nmodel for the distribution of white dwarfs (WDs) in our Galaxy to simulate the\nWD populations in four upcoming wide-field surveys (i.e., LSST, Euclid, the\nRoman Space Telescope and CASTOR) and use the resulting samples to explore some\nrepresentative WD science cases. Our results confirm that LSST will provide a\nwealth of information for Galactic WDs, detecting more than 150 million WDs at\nthe final depth of its stacked, 10-year survey. Within this sample, nearly\n300,000 objects will have 5\σ parallax measurements and nearly 7 million\nwill have 5\σ proper motion measurements, allowing the detection of the\nturn-off in the halo WD luminosity function and the discovery of more than\n200,000 ZZ Ceti stars. The wide wavelength coverage that will be possible by\ncombining LSST data with observations from Euclid, and/or the Roman Space\nTelescope, will also discover more than 3,500 WDs with debris disks,\nhighlighting the advantages of combining data between the ground- and\nspace-based missions.\n