White Dwarfs in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey: the Thin Disk, Thick Disk and Spheroid Luminosity Functions

TL;DR

This paper presents a new statistical method to disentangle the luminosity functions of different stellar populations, using a large white dwarf catalog from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey, improving understanding of the local white dwarf density contributions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel statistical approach to separate kinematic populations in white dwarf luminosity functions without strict velocity cuts, enabling more accurate population analysis.

Findings

First measurement of the thick disk white dwarf luminosity function.

Thin, thick disk, and spheroid populations contribute 79%, 16%, and 5% to local white dwarf density.

Improved constraints on the luminosity functions of all three populations.

Abstract

We present a magnitude and proper motion limited catalogue of ~10,000 white dwarf candidates, obtained from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey by means of reduced proper motion selection. This catalogue extends to magnitudes r~19.75 and proper motions as low as mu ~0.05"/yr, and covers nearly three quarters of the sky. Photometric parallaxes provide distance estimates accurate to ~50%. This catalogue is used to measure the luminosity functions for disk and spheroid white dwarfs, using strict velocity cuts to isolate subsamples belonging to each population. Disk luminosity functions measured in this manner are really a conglomerate of thin and thick disk objects, due to the significant velocity overlap between these populations. We introduce a new statistical approach to the stellar luminosity function for nearby objects that succesfully untangles the contributions from the different kinematic populations, without the need for stringent velocity cuts. This improves the statistical power by allowing all stars to contribute to the luminosity function, even at tangential velocities where the populations are indistinguishable. This method is particularly suited to white dwarfs, for which population discrimination by chemical tagging is not possible. We use this technique to obtain the first measurement of the thick disk white dwarf luminosity function, while also improving constraint on both the thin disk and spheroid luminosity functions. We find that the thin disk, thick disk and spheroid populations contribute to the local white dwarf density in roughly 79%/16%/5% proportions.