Instrumentation for a CCD Survey for White Dwarf Stars

白矮星 CCD 巡天仪器

• 批准号: 9020707
• 负责人: R. Edward Nather
• 金额: $ 5.4万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at Austin
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 1991
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1991-03-01 至 1992-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9020707&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Instrumentation; CCD; Survey; White; Dwarf

White dwarfs are the evolutionary end product of most kinds of stars, including the Sun. Studies of them are important not only from this standpoint but because they are well suited to determine the age of the disk of our Galaxy and also because they excite internal oscillations that can be used to probe their structures. The Principal Investigator (PI) wishes to upgrade a wide field camera he has built with a new large Charged Coupled Device detector that he has already constructed. This camera will be placed on the end of a small telescope and used by a Ph. D. candidate to survey the brightness of up to a million faint objects across the northern sky. This work will give a census of these objects and will improve our understanding of their distribution in luminosity in color, from which one can infer their ages. Thus, this work will provide many new white dwarf candidates for later study as well as lead to a refined determination of the disk of our Galaxy.

白矮星是大多数恒星进化的最终产物，包括太阳。对它们的研究不仅从这个角度来看很重要，而且因为它们非常适合确定我们银河系盘的年龄，还因为它们激发了内部振荡，可以用来探测它们的结构。首席研究员（PI）希望用他已经建造的一个新的大型电荷耦合器件探测器升级他已经建造的宽视场相机。这台相机将被放置在一个小型望远镜的末端，供博士候选人使用，以调查北方天空中多达100万个微弱物体的亮度。这项工作将对这些天体进行普查，并将提高我们对它们在亮度和颜色上的分布的理解，从而可以推断它们的年龄。因此，这项工作将为以后的研究提供许多新的白矮星候选者，并导致对我们银河系盘的精确测定。