White Dwarfs in the Era of the LSST and its Synergies with Space-Based Missions

TL;DR

This paper models white dwarf populations in upcoming wide-field surveys like LSST, Euclid, Roman, and CASTOR, demonstrating their potential for advancing understanding of Galactic structure and WD properties.

Contribution

It introduces a new multi-component model for WD distribution and simulates their detection in future surveys, highlighting the scientific opportunities of combined ground- and space-based data.

Findings

LSST will detect over 150 million WDs.

Nearly 300,000 WDs will have 5σ parallax measurements.

More than 3,500 WDs with debris disks will be discovered.

Abstract

With the imminent start of the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST) on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, and several new space telescopes expected to begin operations later in this decade, both time domain and wide-field astronomy are on the threshold of a new era. In this paper, we use a new, multi-component model for the distribution of white dwarfs (WDs) in our Galaxy to simulate the WD populations in four upcoming wide-field surveys (i.e., LSST, Euclid, the Roman Space Telescope and CASTOR) and use the resulting samples to explore some representative WD science cases. Our results confirm that LSST will provide a wealth of information for Galactic WDs, detecting more than 150 million WDs at the final depth of its stacked, 10-year survey. Within this sample, nearly 300,000 objects will have 5$\sigma$ parallax measurements and nearly 7 million will have 5$\sigma$ proper motion measurements, allowing the detection of the turn-off in the halo WD luminosity function and the discovery of more than 200,000 ZZ Ceti stars. The wide wavelength coverage that will be possible by combining LSST data with observations from Euclid, and/or the Roman Space Telescope, will also discover more than 3,500 WDs with debris disks, highlighting the advantages of combining data between the ground- and space-based missions.