White Dwarfs in the Era of the LSST and its Synergies with Space-Based Missions

With the imminent start of the Legacy Survey for Space and Time (LSST) at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and several new space telescopes expected to begin operations later in this decade, both time-domain and wide-field astronomy are on the threshold of a new era. In this paper, we use a new multicomponent model for the distribution of white dwarfs (WDs) in our Galaxy to simulate the WD populations in four upcoming wide-field surveys (i.e., LSST, Euclid, the Roman Space Telescope, and the Cosmological Advanced Survey Telescope for Optical and uv Research) and use the resulting samples to explore some representative WD science cases. Our results confirm that LSST will provide a wealth of information for Galactic WDs, detecting more than 150 million WDs at the final depth of its stacked 10 yr survey. Within this sample, nearly 300,000 objects will have 5 sigma parallax measurements, and nearly 7 million will have 5 sigma proper-motion measurements, allowing the detection of the turnoff in the halo WD luminosity function and the discovery of more than 200,000 ZZ Ceti stars. The wide wavelength coverage that will be possible by combining LSST data with observations from Euclid and/or the Roman Space Telescope will also discover WDs with debris disks, highlighting the advantages of combining data between the ground- and space-based missions.