Related papers: A Giant Planet Candidate Transiting a White Dwarf
Current theories of planetary evolution predict that infant giant planets have large radii and very low densities before they slowly contract to reach their final size after about several hundred million years. These theoretical…
A gas giant planet which survives the giant branch stages of evolution at a distance of many au and then is subsequently perturbed sufficiently close to a white dwarf will experience orbital shrinkage and circularization due to star-planet…
The aim of the Degenerate Objects around Degenerate Objects (DODO) survey is to search for very low mass brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets in wide orbits around white dwarfs via direct imaging. The direct detection of such companions…
Hot Jupiters are gas giant planets with orbital periods of a few days and are found in 0.1-1% of Sun-like stars. They are expected to be engulfed during their host star's radial expansion on the red giant branch, which may account for…
Giant planets acquire gas, ices and rocks during the early formation stages of planetary systems and thus inform us on the formation process itself. Proceeding from inside out, examining the connections between the deep interiors and the…
Giant planets form in protoplanetary disks while these disks are still gas-rich, and can reveal their presence through the annular gaps they carve out. HD 100546 is a gas-rich disk with a wide gap between between a radius of ~1 and 13 AU,…
Planets and brown dwarfs in close orbits will interact with their host stars, as soon as the stars evolve to become red giants. However, the outcome of those interactions is still unclear. Recently, several brown dwarfs have been discovered…
For the last three years we have performed a survey for young (<3 Gyrs) giant planets around nearby white dwarfs with HST, Spitzer, and VLT. Direct HST/NICMOS imaging of the seven white dwarfs in the Hyades gave no evidence for companions…
At intervals as short as ten thousand years, each white dwarf (WD) passes within a solar radius of a planetoid, i.e., a comet, asteroid, or planet. Gravitational tidal forces tear the planetoid apart; its metal-rich debris falls onto the…
We report on second-epoch imaging of two candidate planet-hosting white dwarfs stars, WD2105-82 and WD1202-232. Both stars showed evidence of resolved, planet-mass candidate companions in observations using the MIRI mid-infrared imager on…
Earth-sized exoplanets that transit nearby, late spectral type red dwarfs will be prime targets for atmospheric characterization in the coming decade. Such systems, however, are difficult to find via wide-field transit surveys like Kepler…
Infrared excesses due to dusty disks have been observed orbiting white dwarfs with effective temperatures between 7200 K and 25000 K, suggesting that the rate of tidal disruption of minor bodies massive enough to create a coherent disk…
1-3 per cent of white dwarfs are orbited by planetary dusty debris detectable as infrared emission in excess above the white dwarf flux. In a rare subset of these systems, a gaseous disc component is also detected via emission lines of the…
We present the discovery of deep but sporadic transits in the flux of SBSS 1232+563, a metal-rich white dwarf polluted by disrupted exoplanetary debris. Nearly 25 years of photometry from multiple sky surveys reveal evidence of occasional…
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…
White dwarfs represent the endpoint of stellar evolution for stars with initial masses between approximately 0.07 msun and 8-10 msun, where msun is the mass of the Sun (more massive stars end their life as either black holes or neutron…
Of the approximately 350 extrasolar planets currently known, of order 10% orbit evolved stars with radii R >~ 2.5 R_sun. These planets are of particular interest because they tend to orbit more massive hosts, and have been subjected to…
We report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate, 2017 OF201, currently located at a distance of 90 au. Its orbit is extremely wide and extends to the inner Oort cloud, with a semi-major axis of 830 au and a perihelion of 45 au,…
The formation channel of the tens of compact debris discs which orbit white dwarfs (WDs) at a distance of one Solar radius remains unknown. Asteroids that survive the giant branch stellar phases beyond a few au are assumed to be dynamically…
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…