Speaker
Description
Over 95% of all stars in the Galaxy share the same fate: to become a white dwarf.
These small, slowly cooling stellar remnants not only encode the stellar formation history of the Milky Way, but are also unique tools with application spanning a wide range of disciplines from stellar evolution to the study of exoplanets, from exotic physics in extreme environments to the origin of type Ia Supernovae. However, white dwarfs are intrinsically faint and sparsely distributed across the entire sky, making them challenging objects to observe.
For over 20 years, the white dwarfs serendipitously observed by SDSS constituted the main resource for the large-scale discovery and characterization of these stellar remnants. Even though these observations led to some groundbreaking work, the SDSS white dwarf sample was inevitably “patchy” and plagued by strong biases.
The advent of Gaia brought forth a revolution in the field and enabled the creation of an all-sky white dwarf sample virtually complete down to 20th magnitude. But now that Gaia has fulfilled its potential, in order to make full use of this unprecedented resource, we need dedicated, large-scale spectroscopic coverage.
Today white dwarfs are no longer just serendipitous targets and SDSS V is the first wide-area spectroscopic survey specifically targeting these stars in both hemispheres.
I will give an overview of the critical impact SDSS V spectroscopy will have in the field of white dwarfs, highlighting some key areas of research like: spectral evolution, the origin of magnetic fields, and the study of planetary remnants.
