Investigating the Colour-Magnitude Relations for White Dwarf Stars in SDSS Photometry

Abstract

In this study, colour-magnitude relations (CMRs) for DA-type white dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) photometric system were investigated. For this purpose, the SDSS data for 20,247 white dwarf stars, as provided in the study by Anguiano et al. (2017), were matched with the Gaia third data release (Gaia DR3) catalogue to obtain trigonometric parallax ($\varpi$) data. The SDSS $ugriz$ magnitudes of the stars were corrected for interstellar extinction using dust maps provided for the Milky Way, and distances from the Sun to the stars were calculated. The SDSS magnitudes were thus corrected for the effects of interstellar extinction. For the calibration of the stars, 5,516 white dwarf stars were selected, with apparent magnitudes brighter than $g_0=21$ mag and relative parallax errors measured to better than $\sigma_\varpi/\varpi=0.1$. Subsequently, three separate CMRs were derived for the absolute magnitudes $M_{\rm g}$, $M_{\rm r}$, and $M_{\rm i}$, each calibrated to two-colour indices. The coefficient of determination ($R^2$) of the obtained CMRs are highly reliable in the bf range of 0.86 to 0.95. Moreover, the standard deviations of the differences between the absolute magnitudes obtained from the relations and the original ones of the calibration stars range from 0.26 to 0.37 mag.