Stellar Systems Group

Kanaan, A.; Schmitz, T.; Alfaro, E. J.; Daflon, S.; Pereira, C. B.; Borges Fernandes, M.; Aparicio Villegas, T.; Gonçalves, D. R.; Lorenz-Martins, S.; Marcolino, W.; Ribeiro, T.; Ederoclite, A.; Vázquez Ramió, H.; Martínez-Delgado, D.
XIV Latin American Regional IAU Meeting (Eds. A. Mateus, J. Gregorio-Hetem & R. Cid Fernandes) Revista Mexicana de Astronomía y Astrofísica (Serie de Conferencias) Vol. 44, pp. 156-156 (2014).
10/2014

ABSTRACT

White dwarfs are the end state of all main sequence stars less massive than 8M_sun, which means that 98% of all stars will end up as white dwarfs. First and foremost, J-PAS will allow us to discover many new white dwarfs. It will go deeper than SDSS; most of SDSS spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs have a magnitude below 20.5, while J-PAS will be complete (5σ detections) down to 22.5 in each filter. So we should see white dwarfs 2.5 times farther than SDSS and therefore the total volume will be (2.5^{3} - 1 = 14.6 times larger. By definition every object in J-PAS will be spectroscopically observed, while in SDSS only chosen objects had their spectra taken, so our white dwarf sample will also be much more complete than SDSS. We expect to increase the total number of white dwarfs from approximately 20,000 to 300,000. Among our goals are the study of the white dwarf luminosity function and the mass distribution.