Related papers: A road-map to white dwarf pollution: Tidal disrupt…
We study the accretion of dust particles of various sizes onto embedded massive gas giant planets, where we take into account the structure of the gas disk due to the presence of the planet. The accretion rate of solids is important for the…
In the Solar System, interplanetary dust particles (IDPs) originating mainly from asteroid collisions and cometary activities drift to the Earth orbit due to the Poynting-Robertson drag. We analyzed the thermal emission from IDPs that was…
Accreting white dwarfs (AWDs) are among the best natural laboratories for understanding disk accretion. Their proximity, brightness, and purely classical nature make them ideal systems in which to probe the fundamental physics that governs…
Recent Kepler photometry has revealed that about half of white dwarfs (WDs) have periodic, low-level (~ 1e-4 - 1e-3), optical variations. Hubble Space Telescope (HST) ultraviolet spectroscopy has shown that up to about one half of WDs are…
Spectroscopic observations of white dwarfs reveal that many of them are polluted by exoplanetary material, whose bulk composition can be uniquely probed this way. We present a spectroscopic and photometric analysis of the DA white dwarf…
Axisymmetric dust rings containing tens to hundreds of Earth masses of solids have been observed in protoplanetary discs with (sub-)millimetre imaging. Here, we investigate the growth of a planetary embryo in a massive (150M$_\oplus$)…
There is increasing evidence for the presence and variability of circumstellar dust and gas around white dwarfs that are polluted with exoplanetary material, although the origin of this dust and gas remains debated. This paper presents the…
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…
Context: Radius and mass measurements of short-period giant planets reveal that many of these planets contain a large amount of heavy elements, in sharp contrast with the expectations of the conventional core-accretion model for the origin…
A significant fraction of isolated white dwarfs host magnetic fields in excess of a MegaGauss. Observations suggest that these fields originate in interacting binary systems where the companion is destroyed thus leaving a singular,…
White dwarfs are compact objects with atmospheres containing mainly light elements, hydrogen or helium. Because of their surface high gravitational field, heavy elements diffuse downwards in a very short timescale compared to the…
White dwarfs that have accreted planetary materials provide a powerful tool to probe the interiors and formation of exoplanets. In particular, the high Fe/Si ratio of some white dwarf pollutants suggests that they are fragments of bodies…
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…
Metal pollution onto white dwarfs is a wide-spread phenomenon that remains puzzling. Some of these white dwarfs also harbour gaseous debris disks. Emission lines from these disks open a unique window to the physical properties of the…
Hydrogen atmosphere white dwarfs with metal lines, so-called DAZs, require external accretion of material to explain the presence of weak metal line absorption in their photospheres. The source of this material is currently unknown, but…
Debris disks around single white dwarfs are thought to be the remains of planetary bodies disrupted by tidal forces. Ongoing accretion of the hereby produced dust allows to detect the planetary material in the white dwarf photosphere and to…
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.…
Polluted white dwarfs provide unique constraints on the elemental compositions of planetary bodies. The tidal disruption of accreting bodies is thought to form circumstellar dusty disks, whose emission spectra could offer additional…
As the descendants of stars with masses less than 8 M$_{\odot}$ on the main sequence, white dwarfs provide a unique way to constrain planetary occurrence around intermediate-mass stars (spectral types BAF) that are otherwise difficult to…
Giant planet atmospheres are thought to reflect the gas phase composition of the disk when and where they formed. However, these atmospheres may also be polluted via solid accretion or ice sublimation in the disk. Here, we propose a novel…