Related papers: Ejection of material --"Jurads" -- from post main …
White dwarfs (WDs) often show metal lines in their spectra, indicating accretion of asteroidal material. Our Sun is to become a WD in several Gyr. Here, we examine how the solar WD accretes from the three major small body populations: the…
The first large interstellar object discovered near Earth, `Oumuamua, showed half a dozen anomalies relative to comets or asteroids in the Solar system. All natural-origin interpretations of the Oumuamua anomalies contemplated objects of a…
Interstellar dust appears in a number of roles in the interstellar medium. Historically, the most familiar one is as a source of extinction in the optical. Absorbed optical and ultraviolet light heats the dust, whence infrared (including…
The origin of the interstellar object 1I/'Oumuamua has defied explanation. We perform calculations of the non-gravitational acceleration that would be experienced by bodies composed of a range of different ices and demonstrate that a body…
Debris discs are commonly detected orbiting main-sequence stars, yet little is known regarding their fate as the star evolves to become a giant. Recent observations of radial velocity detected planets orbiting giant stars highlight this…
We live in an exoplanet revolution, with more than 5,000 exoplanets detected to date. Our ability to characterise individual exoplanets is constantly improving, with exquisite mass and radius measurements for an ever-growing sample of…
Extensive photometric stellar surveys show that many main sequence stars show emission at infrared and longer wavelengths that is in excess of the stellar photosphere; this emission is thought to arise from circumstellar dust. The presence…
Understanding the fate of planetary systems through white dwarfs which accrete debris crucially relies on tracing the orbital and physical properties of exo-asteroids during the giant branch phase of stellar evolution. Giant branch…
The first confirmed interstellar interloper in our Solar System, 1I/`Oumuamua, is likely to be a minor body ejected from another star, but its brief flyby and faintness made it difficult to study. Two remarkable properties are its large (up…
The ejection of planets by the instability of planetary systems is a potential source of free-floating planets. We numerically simulate multi-planet systems to study the evolution process, the properties of surviving systems, and the…
White dwarfs that accrete the debris of tidally disrupted asteroids provide the opportunity to measure the bulk composition of the building blocks, or fragments, of exoplanets. This technique has established a diversity in compositions…
The MIRI Exoplanets Orbiting White dwarfs (MEOW) Survey is a cycle 2 JWST program to search for exoplanets around dozens of nearby white dwarfs via infrared excess and direct imaging. In this paper, we present the detection of mid-infrared…
We present the discovery with WISE of a significant infrared excess associated with the eclipsing post-common envelope binary SDSSJ 030308.35+005443.7, the first excess discovered around a non-interacting white dwarf+main sequence M dwarf…
A quarter of DA white dwarfs are metal polluted, yet elements heavier than helium sink down through the stellar atmosphere on timescales of days. Hence, these white dwarfs must be currently accreting material containing heavy elements.…
This review surveys the observed properties of interstellar dust grains: the wavelength-dependent extinction of starlight, including absorption features, from UV to IR; optical luminescence; IR emission; microwave emission; optical, UV, and…
The infrared dust emission from the white dwarf GD 56 is found to rise and fall by 20% peak-to-peak over 11.2 yr, and is consistent with ongoing dust production and depletion. It is hypothesized that the dust is produced via collisions…
The first interstellar object to be observed in our solar system 1I/2017 U1 'Oumuamua combines the lack of observable cometary activity with an extra-gravitational acceleration. This has given rise to several mutually exclusive explanations…
High levels of exozodiacal dust are observed around a growing number of main sequence stars. The origin of such dust is not clear, given that it has a short lifetime against both collisions and radiative forces. Even a collisional cascade…
The evolution of planetary systems around white dwarfs is crucial to understanding the presence of planetary material in the atmospheres of white dwarfs. These systems uniquely probe exoplanetary compositions. Periodic signals in the…
Brown dwarfs may have such low masses because they are prematurely ejected from small unstable multiple systems, while the members are still actively building up their masses. We demonstrate that this scenario is consistent with all…