Related papers: Polluting White Dwarfs with Perturbed Exo-Comets

Tidal disruption and subsequent accretion of planetesimals by white dwarfs can reveal the elemental abundances of rocky bodies in exoplanetary systems. Those abundances provide information on the composition of the nebula from which the…

Most of low- and intermediate-mass stars that populate the Universe will end their lives as white dwarf stars. These ancient stellar remnants have encrypted inside a precious record of the evolutionary history of the progenitor stars,…

We present models for the formation of terrestrial planets, and the collisional evolution of debris disks, in planetary systems that contain multiple unstable gas giants. We previously showed that the dynamics of the giant planets…

The accretion of tidally disrupted planetary bodies is the current consensus model for the presence of photospheric metals commonly detected in white dwarfs. While most dynamical studies have considered a single star and associated…

White dwarfs are the burnt out cores of Sun-like stars and are the final fate of 97% of all stars in our Galaxy. The internal structure and composition of white dwarfs are hidden by their high gravities, which causes all elements, apart…

Nearly all known white dwarf planetary systems contain detectable rocky debris in the stellar photosphere. A glaring exception is the young and still evolving white dwarf WD J0914+1914, which instead harbours a giant planet and a disc of…

The size distribution and orbital architecture of dust, grains, boulders, asteroids, and major planets during the giant branch phases of evolution dictate the preponderance and observability of the eventual debris, which have been found to…

Understanding stellar evolution and its effect on planetary systems is crucial for correctly interpreting the chemical constraints of exo-planetary material that can be given to us by white dwarfs. This article will describe how asteroids,…

Metal pollution in white dwarf atmospheres may be the accreted remnants of planetary objects. After the discovery of disintegrating planetary objects transiting WD 1145+017 (Vanderburg et al. 2015), undergraduates in the University of…

Identifying planets around O-type and B-type stars is inherently difficult; the most massive known planet host has a mass of only about $3M_{\odot}$. However, planetary systems which survive the transformation of their host stars into white…

Using a high resolution simulation of an isolated dwarf galaxy, accounting for multi-channel stellar feedback and chemical evolution on a star-by-star basis, we investigate how each of 15 metal species are distributed within our multi-phase…

More than a decade after astronomers realized that disrupted planetary material likely pollutes the surfaces of many white dwarf stars, the discovery of transiting debris orbiting the white dwarf WD 1145+017 has opened the door to new…

Planets and other low-mass binary companions to stars face a variety of potential fates as their host stars move off the main sequence and grow to subgiants and giants. Stellar mass loss tends to make orbits expand, and tidal torques tend…

We present new results on PHL 5038AB, a widely separated binary system composed of a white dwarf and a brown dwarf, refining the white and brown dwarf parameters and determining the binary separation to be $66^{+12}_{-24}$~AU. New spectra…

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…

Observations of atmospheric metals and dust discs around white dwarfs provide important clues to the fate of terrestrial planetary systems around intermediate mass stars. We present Spitzer IRAC observations of 15 metal polluted white…

We investigate mass transfer and the formation of disc in binary systems using a combination of numerical simulations and theory. We consider six models distinguished by binary separation, secondary mass and outflow mechanisms. Each system…

We compare the mass distribution of central stars of planetary nebulae (CSPN) with those of their progeny, white dwarfs (WD). We use a dynamical method to measure masses with an uncertainty of 0.02 M$_\odot$. The CSPN mass distribution is…

We present near- and mid-infrared photometry and spectroscopy from PAIRITEL, IRTF, and Spitzer of a metallicity-unbiased sample of 117 cool, hydrogen-atmosphere white dwarfs from the Palomar-Green survey and find five with excess radiation…

White dwarf spectroscopy shows that nearly half of white dwarf atmospheres contain metals that must have been accreted from planetary material that survived the red giant phases of stellar evolution. We can use metal pollution in white…