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| Paper: |
The White Dwarf Luminosity Function: Measurement Errors and Estimators |
| Volume: |
372, 15th European Workshop on White Dwarfs |
| Page: |
73 |
| Authors: |
Torres, S.; Garcia-Berro, E.; Geijo, E.M.; Isern, J. |
| Abstract: |
The white dwarf luminosity function is an important tool for the study of the solar neighborhood, since it allows the determination of a wide range of galactic parameters, the age of the Galactic disk being the most important one. However, the white dwarf luminosity function is not free of biases induced by the measurement errors, sampling biases, the Lutz-Kelker bias or even the contamination of two, or more, kinematic populations - like the thick disk or the halo populations. We have used a Monte Carlo simulator to generate a controlled synthetic population of disk white dwarfs and we analyze the behavior of the 1/Vmax method and of the Choloniewski method for some reasonable assumptions about the measurement errors and the contamination of the sample by the halo white dwarf population. |
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