This award will support an observational survey to detect and characterize a large sample of white dwarf stars. The goals of the project are to search for white dwarf stars in the stellar spectra obtained with the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS) for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), and to create population statistics to study the evolution and origin of many types of single and binary white dwarfs.
The is expected to have an impact on several fields of astrophysics, including the production and evolution of white dwarfs and on the physics of matter at high densities. The project will also involve amateur astronomers and students from high school through graduate school.
