Multi-band photometry and spectroscopy of an all-sky sample of bright white dwarfs

Abstract

The upcoming NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will obtain space-based uninterrupted light curves for a large sample of bright white dwarfs distributed across the entire sky, providing a very rich resource for asteroseismological studies and the search for transits from planetary debris. We have compiled an all-sky catalogue of ultraviolet, optical, and infrared photometry as well as proper motions, which we propose as an essential tool for the preliminary identification and characterisation of potential targets. We present data for 1864 known white dwarfs and 305 high-probability white dwarf candidates brighter than 17 mag. We describe the spectroscopic follow-up of 135 stars, of which 82 are white dwarfs and 25 are hot subdwarfs. The new confirmed stars include six pulsating white dwarf candidates (ZZ Cetis), and nine white dwarf binaries with a cool main-sequence companion. We identify one star with a spectroscopic distance of only 25 pc from the Sun. Around the time TESS is launched, we foresee that all white dwarfs in this sample will have trigonometric parallaxes measured by the ESA Gaia mission next year.

Accepted for publication on MNRAS. 21 pages, 8 tables. Machine readable tables, which will be made also available through VizieR, are also included

References in corpus (23)

• The Gaia mission
• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
• Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
• The K2 Mission: Characterization and Early results
• Gaia Data Release 1: Astrometry - one billion positions, two million proper motions and parallaxes
• Pulsating White Dwarf Stars and Precision Asteroseismology
• New white dwarf stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 10
• The VST Photometric Halpha Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane and Bulge (VPHAS+)
• The initial-final mass relationship of white dwarfs revisited: effect on the luminosity function and mass distribution
• The ELM Survey. I. A Complete Sample of Extremely Low Mass White Dwarfs
• The Second Data Release of the INT Photometric H-Alpha Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2)
• APASS Landolt-Sloan BVgri photometry of RAVE stars. I. Data, effective temperatures and reddenings
• The asteroseismic potential of TESS: exoplanet-host stars
• The chemical diversity of exo-terrestrial planetary debris around white dwarfs
• Evryscope science: exploring the potential of all-sky gigapixel-scale telescopes
• The Solar Neighborhood. XXI. Parallax Results from the CTIOPI 0.9m Program: 20 New Members of the 25 Parsec White Dwarf Sample
• White Dwarf Cosmochronology in the Solar Neighborhood
• Detection limits for close eclipsing and transiting sub-stellar and planetary companions to white dwarfs in the WASP survey
• Spectroscopic Identification of Cool White Dwarfs in the Solar Neighbourhood
• The Gaia DR1 Mass-Radius Relation for White Dwarfs
• Gaia data release 1, the photometric data
• Outbursts in two new cool pulsating DA white dwarfs
• High-speed Photometric Observations of ZZ Ceti White Dwarf Candidates

Cited by in corpus (18)

• The ELM Survey. VIII. 98 Double White Dwarf Binaries
• Partly burnt runaway stellar remnants from peculiar thermonuclear supernovae
• The occurrence of planets and other substellar bodies around white dwarfs using K2
• $\text{Gaia}$ white dwarfs within 40 pc III: spectroscopic observations of new candidates in the southern hemisphere
• White dwarf pollution by hydrated planetary remnants: Hydrogen and Metals in WD J204713.76-125908.9
• Discovery of 74 new bright ZZ Ceti stars in the first three years of TESS
• Measuring White Dwarf Variability from Sparsely Sampled Gaia DR3 Multi-Epoch Photometry
• A White Dwarf-Main Sequence Binary Unveiled by Time-Domain Observations from LAMOST and TESS
• Tilted discs in six poorly studied cataclysmic variables
• Discovery, TESS Characterization, and Modeling of Pulsations in the Extremely Low Mass White Dwarf GD 278
• Perfecting our set of spectrophotometric standard DA white dwarfs
• Accurate mass-radius ratios for Hyades white dwarfs
• All-Sky Faint DA White Dwarf Spectrophotometric Standards for Astrophysical Observatories: The Complete Sample
• Photometric variability of blue straggler stars in M67 with TESS and K2
• Hot white dwarf candidates from the IGAPS-GALEX cross-match
• Variables in the Southern Polar Region Evryscope 2016 Dataset
• A Kepler K2 view of subdwarf A-type stars
• Discovery of a runaway star likely ejected by a Type Iax Supernova