A catalogue of white dwarf candidates in VST ATLAS

Nicola Pietro Gentile Fusillo, Roberto Raddi, Boris T. Gänsicke, J. J. Hermes, Anna F. Pala, Joshua T. Fuchs, Ben Chehade, Nigel Metcalfe, Tom Shanks

Published 2017-03-28Version 1

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has created a knowledge gap between the Northern and the Southern hemispheres which is very marked for white dwarfs: only $\simeq 15$% of the known white dwarfs are south of the equator. Here we make use of the VST ATLAS survey, one of the first surveys obtaining deep, optical, multi-band photometry over a large area of the southern skies, to remedy this situation. Applying the colour and proper-motion selection developed in Gentile Fusillo et al. (2015a) to the most recent internal data release (2016 April 25) of VST ATLAS we created a catalogue of $\simeq 4200$ moderately bright ($g\leq19$), high-confidence southern white dwarf candidates, which can be followed up individually with both the large array of southern telescopes or in bulk with forthcoming multi-object spectrographs.