Related papers: Explorations of Dusty Debris Disk Geometry
White dwarfs are routinely observed to have polluted atmospheres, and sometimes significant infrared excesses, that indicate ongoing accretion of circumstellar dust and rocky debris. Typically this debris is assumed to be in the form of a…
Many white dwarfs host disks of dust produced by disintegrating planetesimals and revealed by infrared excesses. The disk around G29-38 was the first to be discovered and is now well-observed, yet we lack a cohesive picture of its geometry…
We present a simple method for identifying candidate white dwarf systems with dusty exoplanetary debris based on a single temperature blackbody model fit to the infrared excess. We apply this technique to a sample of Southern Hemisphere…
The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…
Archival data from the WISE satellite reveals infrared flux variations of tens of per cent around numerous dusty white dwarfs. Data spanning more than seven years reveal more than half of known systems are varying in the 3.4 micron band,…
Planetary systems commonly survive the evolution of single stars, as evidenced by terrestrial-like planetesimal debris observed orbiting and polluting the surfaces of white dwarfs. This letter reports the identification of a circumbinary…
This letter reports 12 novel spectroscopic detections of warm circumstellar dust orbiting polluted white dwarfs using JWST MIRI. The disks span two orders of magnitude in fractional infrared brightness and more than double the number of…
The photospheres of some white dwarfs are "polluted" by accretion of material from their surrounding planetary debris. White dwarfs with dust disks are often heavily polluted and high-resolution spectroscopic observations of these systems…
Observations show that early-type galaxies contain a considerable amount of interstellar dust, most of which is believed to exist as a diffusely distributed component. We construct a four-parameter elliptical galaxy model in order to…
This study presents all available, multi-epoch 3.6 and 4.5 $\mu$m photometry from Spitzer Space Telescope observations of white dwarf debris disks, including weekly cadence observations of 16 relatively bright systems, and 5 h staring-mode…
We present results of a study aimed at deriving fundamental properties of circumstellar debris disks from observed infrared to submillimeter spectral energy distributions. This investigation is motivated by increasing telescope/detector…
We study interstellar dust evolution in various environments by means of chemical evolution models for galaxies of different morphological types. We start from the formalism developed by Dwek (1998) to study dust evolution in the solar…
Diffuse elliptical galaxies (or dwarfs) are the numerically dominant population in clusters like Virgo and Fornax. They carry only a few percent of the baryonic mass but are very sensitive to the environment; so they keep a fossil record of…
We have performed a comprehensive ground-based observational program aimed at characterizing the circumstellar material orbiting three single white dwarf stars previously known to possess gaseous disks. Near-infrared imaging unambiguously…
The presence of dust in elliptical galaxies has recently been shown to be quite common. Deep optical multi-colour CCD imaging has revealed the presence of dust lanes and patches, and the technique of co-adding IRAS survey scans has led to…
Circumstellar disks of planetary debris are now known or suspected to closely orbit hundreds of white dwarf stars. To date, both data and theory support disks that are entirely contained within the preceding giant stellar radii, and hence…
Gaseous and dust debris disks around white dwarfs (WDs) are formed from tidally disrupted planetary bodies. This offers an opportunity to determine the composition of exoplanetary material by measuring element abundances in the accreting…
We investigate how significant the spiral structure is on calculations concerning radiative transfer in dusty spiral galaxies seen edge-on. The widely adopted exponential disk model (i.e. both the stars and the dust are distributed…
We review recent progress in high-resolution imaging of scattered light from disks around young stellar objects. Many new disks have been discovered or imaged in scattered light, and improved instrumentation and observing techniques have…
High-resolution scattered-light imaging has revealed complex morphologies in protoplanetary and circumstellar disks. Measuring the vertical height of the scattering surface is key to understanding disk structure, evolution, and the…