Photometric Identification of Cool White Dwarfs

Abstract

We investigate the use of a narrowband DDO51 filter for photometric identification of cool white dwarfs. We report photometric observations of 30 known cool white dwarfs with temperatures ranging from 10,000 K down to very cool temperatures (?3500 K). Follow-up spectroscopic observations of a sample of objects selected using this filter and our photometric observations show that DDO51 filter photometry can help select cool white dwarf candidates for follow-up multiobject spectroscopy by rejecting 65% of main-sequence stars with the same broadband colors as the cool white dwarfs. This technique is not selective enough to efficiently feed single-object spectrographs. We present the white dwarf cooling sequence using this filter. Our observations show that very cool white dwarfs form a sequence in the r - DDO versus r - z color-color diagram and demonstrate that significant improvements are needed in white dwarf model atmospheres.