# A catalogue of white dwarf candidates in VST ATLAS

## TL;DR

This paper utilizes the VST ATLAS survey to identify approximately 4200 high-confidence white dwarf candidates in the southern hemisphere, addressing the existing knowledge gap caused by the SDSS survey's northern bias.

## Contribution

It introduces a new catalogue of southern white dwarf candidates using VST ATLAS data and a refined selection method, expanding the known white dwarf population in the south.

## Key findings

- Created a catalogue of ~4200 white dwarf candidates
- Applied a color and proper-motion selection method
- Addresses the SDSS northern hemisphere bias

## Abstract

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has created a knowledge gap between the Northern and the Southern hemispheres which is very marked for white dwarfs: only $\simeq 15$% of the known white dwarfs are south of the equator. Here we make use of the VST ATLAS survey, one of the first surveys obtaining deep, optical, multi-band photometry over a large area of the southern skies, to remedy this situation. Applying the colour and proper-motion selection developed in Gentile Fusillo et al. (2015a) to the most recent internal data release (2016 April 25) of VST ATLAS we created a catalogue of $\simeq 4200$ moderately bright ($g\leq19$), high-confidence southern white dwarf candidates, which can be followed up individually with both the large array of southern telescopes or in bulk with forthcoming multi-object spectrographs.