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Title:
White Dwarfs in the HET Dark Energy Experiment Barbara
Speaker:
Abstract:
I will present the first results of the survey of all white dwarfs (WD) that were observed in the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) using the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS). The final outcome will be a unique magnitude-limited catalog of spectroscopically confirmed stars up to 4.5kpc (g~23.5). Since we use data from an IFU, our survey is free of the selection biases that plagued the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The critical advantages of our program are our ability to produce a WD luminosity function five magnitudes fainter than the one derived from the Palomar-Green survey (PG) and with similar number of faint stars as the one from the SDSS. Our project will directly result in a more precise age of the Galactic thin and thick disks, better population statistics on all types of WDs and WD in binary systems, critically impacting the WD field and many other related fields of astronomy.
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