Allyson Woodruff Ted von Hippel Alisa Tiselska Joseph Hammill
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
We are analyzing white dwarf photometry from Pan-STARRS and astrometry from Gaia to obtain the star formation history of the Milky Way’s thin disk and thick disk. We find that white dwarfs with parall..
We are analyzing white dwarf photometry from Pan-STARRS and astrometry from Gaia to obtain the star formation history of the Milky Way’s thin disk and thick disk. We find that white dwarfs with parallax precisions better than 2% and precursor masses above 1.5 solar masses can provide precise age estimates. Using the proper motion and stellar parallaxes of these stars, as well as an estimated radial velocity, we calculated the U, V, and W velocities for each star. From these values we calculate the probability for each white dwarf of which stellar population it most likely resides in. This gave us a list of white dwarf candidates for each population, which we will use in a hierarchical analysis to estimate the star formation history of the thin and thick disk of the Milky Way.
