Presentation Abstract

Presentation Number 333.08
Presentation Time: Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011, 9:00 AM - 6:30 PM
Title First Results From The Wise Infared Excesses Around Degenerates (WIRED) Survey
Author Block John H. Debes1, D. W. Hoard2, S. Wachter3, D. T. Leisawitz1, M. Cohen4
1NASA/GSFC, 2Spitzer Science Center, 3IPAC, 4Monterey Institute for Research in Astronomy.
Abstract The WISE IR Excesses around Degenerates (WIRED) Survey is designed to find low mass companions and dusty disks around white dwarfs using NASA's Wide-field Infared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. WISE has finished scanning the entire sky, and we have currently cross-correlated the SDSS DR7 white dwarf catalogue with 2MASS, UKIDSS, and WISE photometry to identify candidate excess sources. An overview of the survey is part of a companion presentation at this AAS meeting (Hoard et al.). We show the expected sensitivity level of the WIRED Survey to white dwarfs with dust and/or low mass companions, and present new candidate WISE detections.
This work was supported in part by the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (J.D.), and is based on data from: WISE, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology(Caltech), funded by NASA; the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS); the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)/Caltech, funded by NASA and the NSF; and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Funding for the SDSS and SDSS-II was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the NSF, the U. S. Dept. of Energy, NASA, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. We used the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, and the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, operated by JPL, Caltech, under a contract with NASA.