Related papers: A wide binary trigger for white dwarf pollution
Low mass helium-core white dwarfs (M < 0.45 Msun) can be produced from interacting binary systems, and traditionally all of them have been attributed to this channel. However, a low mass white dwarf could also result from a single star that…
Astrometry from the Gaia mission has revealed a large population of white dwarf (WD) + main sequence (MS) binaries with periods of $100 - 1000\,$d. These systems have separations intermediate to predictions from standard binary evolution…
White dwarfs, the extremely dense remnants left behind by most stars after their death, are characterised by a mass comparable to that of the Sun compressed into the size of an Earth-like planet. In the resulting strong gravity, heavy…
A non negligible fraction of white dwarf stars show the presence of heavy elements in their atmospheres. The most accepted explanation for this contamination is the accretion of material coming from tidally disrupted planetesimals, which…
I demonstrate that an effect similar to the Roemer delay, familiar from timing radio pulsars, should be detectable in the first eclipsing double white dwarf (WD) binary, NLTT 11748. By measuring the difference of the time between the…
Studies suggest that the pollution of white dwarf (WD) atmospheres arises from the accretion of minor planets, but the exact properties of polluting material, and in particular the evidence for water in some cases are not yet understood.…
Recent surveys have allowed to derive the white dwarf mass distribution with reasonable accuracy. This distribution shows a noticeable degree of structure that it is often attributed to the evolution of close binaries in general, and to…
Very low-mass main-sequence stars reveal some curious trends in observed rotation period distributions that require abating the spin-down that standard rotational evolution models would otherwise imply. By dynamically coupling magnetically…
The third data release of Gaia was the first to include orbital solutions assuming non-single stars. Here, we apply the astrometric triage technique of Shahaf et al. to identify binary star systems with companions that are not single…
We report the discovery of 24 spectroscopic binary companions to giant stars. We fully constrain the orbital solution for 6 of these systems. We cannot unambiguously derive the orbital elements for the remaining stars because the phase…
Do white dwarfs host asteroid systems? Although several lines of argument suggest that white dwarfs may be orbited by large populations of asteroids, transits would provide the most direct evidence. We demonstrate that the Kepler mission…
Many white dwarfs have accreted material from their own planetary systems. These objects can be used to infer the composition of exoplanetary material and identify evidence for key geological processes. However, the white dwarf atmospheric…
For the stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds (SGWBs) search centred at the milli-Hz band, the galactic foreground produced by white dwarf binaries (WDBs) within the Milky Way contaminates the extra-galactic signal severely. Because of…
Robust evidence of an ice giant planet shedding its atmosphere around the white dwarf WD J0914+1914 represents a milestone in exoplanetary science, allowing us to finally supplement our knowledge of white dwarf metal pollution, debris discs…
Although not nearly as numerous as binaries with two white dwarfs, eccentric neutron star-white dwarf (NS-WD) binaries are important gravitational-wave (GW) sources for the next generation of space-based detectors sensitive to low frequency…
We present the results of a search for wide binary systems among 783 members of three nearby young associations: Taurus-Auriga, Chamaeleon I, and two subgroups of Upper Scorpius. Near-infrared (JHK) imagery from 2MASS was analyzed to search…
This paper investigates the frequency of transiting planetary systems around metal-polluted white dwarfs using high-cadence photometry from ULTRACAM and ULTRASPEC on the ground, and space-based observations with TESS. Within a sample of 313…
Magnitude-limited samples have shown that 20-25 per cent of cataclysmic variables contain white dwarfs with magnetic fields of Mega Gauss strength, in stark contrast to the approximately 5 per cent of single white dwarfs with similar…
Low mass white dwarfs are the remnants of disrupted red giant stars in binary millisecond pulsars and other exotic binary star systems. Some low mass white dwarfs cool rapidly, while others stay bright for millions of years due to stable…
An accumulation of multi-epoch, high-resolution, optical spectra reveal that the nearby star G77-50 is a very cool DAZ white dwarf externally polluted by Mg, Fe, Al, Ca, and possibly Na, Cr, Mn. The metallic and hydrogen absorption features…