Description
The vast majority of stars -- $\sim$95\% -- are born with masses below 8-10 M$_{\odot}$ and will eventually evolve into a white dwarf. Because of this, white dwarfs play an integral role in deepening our understanding of the structure and evolutionary history of stellar bodies. They, however, present observational limitations because of their Earth-like radius and low luminosity. Since about a third of all white dwarfs are in binary systems, many of them in very close ($\sim$hours) orbits, transit events have been highlighted as a key method to help discover these systems. In this talk, I will discuss my search for eclipsing binary systems containing a white dwarf, which was conducted using the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) private data archive. I will showcase the capabilities of NGTS in capturing such events from newly discovered candidates and present preliminary analysis through the use of methods such as Box-least squares and Lomb-Scargle algorithms and Spectral Energy Distribution fitting. With my analysis, I am able to obtain preliminary model-dependent orbital and physical parameters for the candidates, from which inferences can be made about the potential evolutionary history of the binary system. These results highlight the potential of NGTS to study faint binary systems, which allows us to conduct a blind survey of areas of the sky to discover new and important systems.
