A Determination of the Local Density of White Dwarf Stars

The most recent version of the Catalog of Spectroscopically Identified White Dwarfs lists 2249 white dwarf stars. Among these stars are 118 white dwarfs that have either reliable trigonometric parallaxes or color-based distance moduli which place them at a distance within 20 pc of the Sun. Most of these nearby white dwarfs are isolated stars, but 35 (30 % of the sample) are in binary systems, including such well known systems as Sirius A/B, and Procyon A/B. There are also three double degenerate systems in this sample of the local white dwarf population. The sample of local white dwarfs is largely complete out to 13 pc and the local density of white dwarf stars is found to be (5.5 +/- 0.8) x 10^-3 pc^-3 with a corresponding mass density of (3.7 +/- 0.5) x10^-3 M pc^-3.