A New Ultracool White Dwarf Discovered in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey

Abstract

We present photographic B, R and I photometry, and optical and near-infrared spectroscopy, of a new ultracool white dwarf (UCWD) discovered in the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey. The spectrum of SSSJ1556-0806 shows strong flux suppression due to the presence of collisionally induced absorption by molecular hydrogen (H2CIA), a feature characteristic of the cool, high density environments found in the atmospheres of ultracool white dwarfs. SSSJ1556-0806 therefore joins a list of <10 ultracool white dwarfs displaying extreme flux suppression. Synthetic model fitting suggests an effective temperature <3000K, which if true would make this one of the coolest white dwarfs currently known. We also exploit the similarity between the SEDs of SSSJ1556-0806 and the well-studied UCWD LHS 3250 to aid in the determination of the atmospheric parameters in a regime where models consistently fail to reproduce observations. SSSJ1556-0806 is relatively bright (R ~ 17.8), making it particularly amenable to follow up observations to obtain trigonometric parallax and IR photometry.