An Overview of Exocomets
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
2025-11-12 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Abstract
We give a general overview of what the scientific community refers to as "exocomets". The general definition of exocomets, as presented in this work, is discussed and compared with Solar System comets and interstellar objects, addressing their detection around main-sequence stars as well as orbiting white dwarfs. We introduce the different types of exocomet observations, highlighting the difference between exocometary 'bodies' and exocometary 'material'. We provide a census of all exocometary system candidates detected so far, both via spectroscopy and photometry, including detections around white dwarfs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.08270,
title = {An Overview of Exocomets},
author = {Daniela Iglesias and Isabel Rebollido and Azib Norazman and Colin Snodgrass and Darryl Z. Seligman and Siyi Xu and H. Jens Hoeijmakers and Matthew Kenworthy and Alain Lecavelier des Etangs and Michele Bannister and Bin Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.08270},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
49 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. Accepted to Space Science Reviews