TY - JOUR A1 - Pelisoli, Ingrid Domingos A1 - Vos, Joris T1 - Gaia Data Release 2 catalogue of extremely low-mass white dwarf candidates JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - Extremely low-mass white dwarf stars (ELMs) are M < 0.3 M-circle dot helium-core white dwarfs born either as a result of a common-envelope phase or after a stable Roche lobe overflow episode in a multiple system. The Universe is not old enough for ELMs to have formed through single-star evolution channels. As remnants of binary evolution, ELMs can shed light onto the poorly understood phase of common-envelope evolution and provide constraints to the physics of mass accretion. Most known ELMs will merge in less than a Hubble time, providing an important contribution to the signal to be detected by upcoming space-based gravitational wave detectors. There are currently less than 150 known ELMs; most were selected by colour, focusing on hot objects, in a magnitude-limited survey of the Northern hemisphere only. Recent theoretical models have predicted a much larger space density for ELMs than estimated observationally based on this limited sample. In order to perform meaningful comparisons with theoretical models and test their predictions, a larger well-defined sample is required. In this work, we present a catalogue of ELM candidates selected from the second data release of Gaia (DR2). We have used predictions from theoretical models and analysed the properties of the known sample to map the space spanned by ELMs in the Gaia Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Defining a set of colour cuts and quality flags, we have obtained a final sample of 5762 ELM candidates down to T-eff approximate to 5000 K. KW - catalogues KW - surveys KW - binaries: close KW - white dwarfs Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1876 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 488 IS - 2 SP - 2892 EP - 2903 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fusillo, Nicola Pietro Gentile A1 - Tremblay, Pier-Emmanuel A1 - Gänsicke, Boris T. A1 - Manser, Christopher J. A1 - Cunningham, Tim A1 - Cukanovaite, Elena A1 - Hollands, Mark A1 - Marsh, Thomas A1 - Raddi, Roberto A1 - Jordan, Stefan A1 - Toonen, Silvia A1 - Geier, Stephan Alfred A1 - Barstow, Martin A1 - Cummings, Jeffrey D. T1 - A Gaia Data Release 2 catalogue of white dwarfs and a comparison with SDSS JF - Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society N2 - We present a catalogue of white dwarf candidates selected from the second data release of Gaia (DR2). We used a sample of spectroscopically confirmed white dwarfs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to map the entire space spanned by these objects in the Gaia Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. We then defined a set of cuts in absolute magnitude, colour, and a number of Gaia quality flags to remove the majority of contaminating objects. Finally, we adopt a method analogous to the one presented in our earlier SDSS photometric catalogues to calculate a probability of being a white dwarf (PWD) for all Gaia sources that passed the initial selection. The final catalogue is composed of 486641 stars with calculated PWD from which it is possible to select a sample of ≃260000 high-confidence white dwarf candidates in the magnitude range 8 < G < 21. By comparing this catalogue with a sample of SDSS white dwarf candidates, we estimate an upper limit in completeness of 85 per cent for white dwarfs with G ≤ 20 mag and Teff >7000 K, at high Galactic latitudes (|b| > 20°). However, the completeness drops at low Galactic latitudes, and the magnitude limit of the catalogue varies significantly across the sky as a function of Gaia’s scanning law. We also provide the list of objects within our sample with available SDSS spectroscopy. We use this spectroscopic sample to characterize the observed structure of the white dwarf distribution in the H–R diagram. KW - catalogues KW - surveys KW - white dwarfs Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/sty3016 SN - 0035-8711 SN - 1365-2966 VL - 482 IS - 4 SP - 4570 EP - 4591 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -