White Dwarfs in SDSS DR9 and DR10


Paper:	White Dwarfs in SDSS DR9 and DR10
Volume:	493, 19th European Workshop on White Dwarfs
Page:	437
Authors:	Gentile Fusillo, N. P.; Gänsicke, B.; Koester, D.
Abstract:	Currently the largest catalogue of spectroscopically identified WDs is based on the 7th Data Release (DR) of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and contains over 20000 WDs (Kleinman et al. 2013). However, only a fraction of all WDs in the photometric footprint of SDSS have been spectroscopically followed up. Using DR7 spectroscopy as a training sample, we developed a method to select high confidence photometric WD candidates. The novelty of our selection is that it allows us to assign to any object with multi-colour and proper motion data a well-defined "probability of being a white dwarf" (or a contaminant). Exploiting this selection method we compiled a catalogue (Gentile Fusillo et al. in prep) which currently covers the entire photometric footprint of SDSS, 14555sq deg, with a limiting magnitude of g ≤ 19. The catalogue contains over 20000 high-confidence WDs and WD candidates 11500 of which have not yet been followed up with Sloan spectroscopy. Even though, so far, our catalogue relies only SDSS we plan to extend the sky coverage as additional deep multi-colour large area surveys become available. DR10 includes over 1.4 million spectra taken with the new BOSS spectrograph, which improves over the original SDSS spectograph in both resolution and wavelength coverage, but has so far not been systematically mined for WD science. As part of this project, we also inspected over 8000 BOSS spectra of bright (g ≤ 19) colour selected sources and classified 1765 new WDs. We used this independent, spectroscopically confirmed sample to further validate our selection method. Finally we discuss possible application of our catalogue , focusing on the selection and follow up of 9 new DZs which show strong pollution from elements other than Ca and IR excess emission emission consistent with the presence of debris discs.