Related papers: No evidence for a strong decrease of planetesimal …
It was recently proposed that metal-rich white dwarfs (WDs) accrete their metals from compact debris disks found to exist around more than a dozen of them. At the same time, elemental abundances measured in atmospheres of some WDs imply…
White dwarfs stars are known to be polluted by their active planetary systems, but little attention has been paid to the accretion of wind from low-mass companions. The capture of stellar or substellar wind by white dwarfs is one of few…
High-metallicity pollution is common in white dwarf (WD) stars hosting remnant planetary systems. However, they rarely have detectable debris accretion discs, possibly because much of the influx is fast steeply-infalling debris in…
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…
Nine metal-polluted white dwarfs are observed with medium-resolution optical spectroscopy,where photospheric abundances are determined and interpreted through comparison against solar system objects. An improved method of making such…
Most observations of polluted white dwarf atmospheres are consistent with accretion of water depleted planetary material. Among tens of known cases, merely two cases involve accretion of objects that contain a considerable mass fraction of…
White dwarfs experience a thermal renaissance when they receive mass from a stellar companion in a binary. For accretion rates < 10^-8 Msun/yr, the freshly accumulated hydrogen/helium envelope ignites in a thermally unstable manner that…
We present follow-up spectroscopy and a detailed model atmosphere analysis of 29 wide double white dwarfs, including eight systems with a crystallized C/O core member. We use state-of-the-art evolutionary models to constrain the physical…
Accreting white dwarfs (WDs) with non-degenerate companions are expected to emit in soft X-rays and the UV, if accreted H-rich material burns stably. They are an important component of the unresolved emission of elliptical galaxies, and…
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…
Formation models in which terrestrial bodies grow via the pairwise accretion of planetesimals have been reasonably successful at reproducing the general properties of the solar system, including small body populations. However, planetesimal…
Polluted white dwarfs offer a unique way to study the bulk compositions of exoplanetary material, but it is not always clear if this material originates from comets, asteroids, moons, or planets. We combine N-body simulations with an…
Accretion of planetary material onto host stars may occur throughout a star's life. Especially prone to accretion, extrasolar planets in short-period orbits, while relatively rare, constitute a significant fraction of the known population,…
Cooling ages of white dwarfs are routinely determined by mapping effective temperatures and masses to ages using evolutionary models. Typically, the reported uncertainties on cooling ages only consider the error propagation of the…
We run numerical simulations to study the accretion of gas and dust grains onto gas giant planets embedded into massive protoplanetary discs. The outcome is found to depend on the disc cooling rate, planet mass, grain size and irradiative…
Studies of cool white dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood have placed a limit on the age of the Galactic disk of 8-9 billion years. However, determining their cooling ages requires the knowledge of their effective temperatures, masses, radii,…
An XMM-Newton observation of the nearby "pre-cataclysmic" short-period (P_orb = 3.62 hr) binary QS Vir (EC 13471-1258) revealed regular narrow X-ray eclipses when the white dwarf passed behind its M2-4 dwarf companion. The X-ray emission…
We present dynamically consistent solutions for hot accretion onto unmagnetized, rotating white dwarfs (WDs) in five quiescent dwarf novae. The measured WD rotation rates (and other system parameters) in RX And, SS Cyg, U Gem, VW Hyi and WZ…
Cataclysmic Variables (CVs) are close binary star systems with one component an accreting white dwarf (WD) and the other a larger cooler star that fills its Roche Lobe. One consequence of the WDs accreting material, is the possibility that…
About 25-50% of white dwarfs (WDs) show metal lines in their spectra. Among the widely accepted explanations for this effect is that the these WDs are accreting asteroids that are perhaps flung onto the WDs by a planet via resonance, for…