A catalogue of eclipsing white dwarfs from the Zwicky Transient Facility

A catalogue of 1,348 eclipsing white dwarf binary systems (921 detached and 427 accreting) identified in Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) data, together with the calibrated ZTF light curves used in the analysis and physical parameters from binary star modelling for the detached subset.

Go to janvanroestel.github.io/eclipsingWD-explorer to explore the dataset in an interactive way.

What's included

• catalogue_observational (1,348 rows; CSV + FITS) — identification, J2000 coordinates, multi-survey photometry (Gaia EDR3, PanSTARRS, SDSS, 2MASS, CatWISE, GALEX), distances and dust extinction, classification flags (accreting / magnetic / outbursting / spot / reflection / ellipsoidal / flares), and parameters from a simple analytical light-curve fit.
• catalogue_physical (921 rows; CSV + FITS) — physical binary-model parameters from ellc light-curve + SED fits for the detached subset: white-dwarf and companion masses, radii, temperatures, surface gravity, distance, semi-major axis, inclination, white-dwarf cooling age, and Roche-lobe fill factor — each with 5th / 50th / 95th percentile values.
• lightcurves/ (1,348 files, ~195 MB) — calibrated ZTF g/r/i light curves in tab-separated ASCII (BJD_TDB, flux in Jy, uncertainty, filter ID, and provenance columns). Most are derived from forced photometry; a few use the alternate PSF-photometry pipeline.

Sample selection

• The system is periodically eclipsing.
• The primary is a white dwarf and the companion is a brown dwarf or a red dwarf.
• Both detached and accreting systems (CVs, polars, intermediate polars) are included; double white dwarfs and AM CVn systems are not.
• The eclipse signal was detected by the ZTF systematic search.

The physical catalogue is the detached subset of the observational catalogue with a binary-model fit. Accreting systems are excluded from this subset because the simple two-body model is not appropriate when an accretion disc, hotspot, or cyclotron emission dominates the light-curve morphology.

Quality flags

Per-pipeline quality flags (lf_quality_flag, bf_quality_flag) mark objects whose fits should be treated with caution. For population science, filter quality_flag == 0 or <= 1. See data_dictionary.md for the full scheme.

Companion paper

van Roestel, J. (in prep.) "Eclipsing white dwarfs from the Zwicky Transient Facility: I. A systematic search for eclipsing white dwarfs." The paper describes the search method, sample completeness, fitting procedures, and population-level results in detail.

How to cite

Please cite both this Zenodo deposit (10.5281/zenodo.15007293 — always cite the concept DOI) and the companion paper. The standard ZTF acknowledgement (Bellm et al. 2019; Graham et al. 2019) and the input survey citations are listed in the bundled README.md.

Released under CC-BY-4.0.