$Gaia$ white dwarfs within 40 pc II: the volume-limited northern hemisphere sample

Understand

We present an overview of the sample of northern hemisphere white dwarfs within 40 pc of the Sun detected from $Gaia$ Data Release 2 (DR2).

• We find that 521 sources are spectroscopically confirmed degenerate stars, 111 of which were first identified as white dwarf candidates from $Gaia$ DR2 and followed-up recently with the William Herschel Telescope and Gran Telescopio Canarias.
• Three additional white dwarf candidates remain spectroscopically unobserved and six unresolved binaries are known to include a white dwarf but were not in our initial selection of white dwarfs in the $Gaia$ DR2 Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (HRD).
• Atmospheric parameters are calculated from $Gaia$ and Pan-STARRS photometry for all objects in the sample, confirming most of the trends previously observed in the much smaller 20 pc sample.