Building an All-sky Photometric Reference using DA White Dwarfs

Date: Friday 08 September 2023, 6.00PM
Online
Local Group Meeting


Share this event

Photometry – measuring the fluxes of sources – is one of the most fundamental operations in astrophysics. It therefore underlies experiments like determining distances or photometric redshifts to objects, impacts our understanding of their underlying physics, and at a population level, limits how well we can infer the Hubble constant, or the equation of state of dark energy. Getting fluxes wrong by a couple of percent can move galaxies from a photo-z of 13 to a much more modest 4. I will review how we currently determine fluxes, and what the drawbacks of existing methods. I will introduce a network of faint DA white dwarf that we have studies using over a 150 HST orbits and hours of ground-based spectroscopy to establish the most precise network of photometric standards ever down to V=19.5 mag, with agreement between models and data at the 4 millimag level. I’ll describe how we are moving these white dwarfs to building all-sky photometric catalogs, bootstrapping wide-field surveys, and how these improvements will impact the next generation of survey experiments, particularly the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.
 
Gautham Narayan
 
RSS Reading Local Group