A Determination of the Luminosity Function of DA White Dwarfs from the Kiso Survey

TL;DR

This paper recalculates the luminosity function of DA white dwarfs from the Kiso survey using spectroscopic data, providing a more precise comparison with previous empirical and spectroscopic results.

Contribution

It introduces a spectroscopic method to derive the luminosity function, improving accuracy over prior photometric calibration approaches.

Findings

Luminosity function aligns closely with PG survey results.

Spectroscopic method reduces classification errors.

Comparison with previous studies highlights improvements in accuracy.

Abstract

We rederive the luminosity function for the sample of DA white dwarfs from the Kiso Schmidt ultraviolet excess survey (KUV stars) using the spectroscopic method where the atmospheric parameters (Teff and log g) and absolute visual magnitudes for each star are obtained from detailed model atmosphere fits to optical spectroscopic data. We compare the result of our determination with that obtained by Darling (1994) based on empirical photometric calibrations. Our luminosity function is also compared with that derived spectroscopically from the PG survey. Misclassified objects are also briefly discussed.