Related papers: The Future of Evolved Planetary Systems
Among the many recommendations of the Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics 2020, we found that a priority area of research is to pave the pathways towards finding and characterizing habitable worlds. In this context, we aim to…
Each galaxy is observed only once along its life, making galaxy evolution fundamentally an inverse statistical problem: time-dependent physics must be inferred from ensembles of single-epoch snapshots. To move beyond descriptive scaling…
EL CVn-type systems represent a rare evolutionary stage in binary star evolution, providing ideal laboratories for investigating stable mass transfer processes and the formation of extremely low-mass white dwarfs (ELM WDs). The Transiting…
The field of exoplanetary science is making rapid progress both in statistical studies of exoplanet properties as well as in individual characterization. As space missions provide an emerging picture of formation and evolution of…
Exoplanet hunting efforts have revealed the prevalence of exotic worlds with diverse properties, including Earth-sized bodies, which has fueled our endeavor to search for life beyond the Solar System. Accumulating experiences in…
The ultimate fates of binary companions to stars (including whether the companion survives and the final orbit of the binary) are of interest in light of an increasing number of recently discovered, low-mass companions to white dwarfs…
We outline the important role that ground-based, Doppler monitoring of exoplanetary systems will play in advancing our theories of planet formation and dynamical evolution. A census of planetary systems requires a well designed survey to be…
Studying exoplanets with their parent stars is crucial to understand their population, formation and history. We review some of the key questions regarding their evolution with particular emphasis on giant gaseous exoplanets orbiting close…
Results are presented for a Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys high-resolution imaging campaign of 90 white dwarfs with known or suspected low mass stellar and substellar companions. Of the 72 targets which remain candidate…
Over the past several decades, thousands of planets have been discovered outside of our Solar System. These planets exhibit enormous diversity, and their large numbers provide a statistical opportunity to place our Solar System within the…
There is an opportunity to advance both solar system and extrasolar planetary studies that does not require the construction of new telescopes or new missions but better use and access to inter-disciplinary data sets. This approach…
The last two decades have seen remarkable progress in our long-standing goal of determining the abundance and diversity of worlds in the Galaxy. Understanding of this subject involves tracing the path of interstellar material from dense…
We know that planetary systems are just as common around white dwarfs as around main sequence stars. However, self-consistently linking a planetary system across these two phases of stellar evolution through the violent giant branch poses…
One of the prominent science goal of the ELTs will be to study the physics and mass assembly of galaxies at very high redshifts. Here, we present the galaxy evolution science case for EAGLE, which is a NIR multi-integral field spectrograph…
High-resolution absorption spectroscopy toward bright background sources has had a paramount role in understanding early galaxy formation, the evolution of the intergalactic medium and the reionisation of the Universe. However, these…
The millihertz band is densely populated by continuous gravitational-wave signals from Galactic compact binaries, dominated by double white dwarfs (DWDs; binaries of two white dwarfs) with contributions from systems containing neutron stars…
Exoplanet science is now in its full expansion, particularly after the CoRoT and Kepler space missions that led us to the discovery of thousands of extra-solar planets. The last decade has taught us that UV observations play a major role in…
This whitepaper discusses the diversity of exoplanets that could be detected by future observations, so that comparative exoplanetology can be performed in the upcoming era of large space-based flagship missions. The primary focus will be…
Previous investigations have revealed that eccentric super-Earths represent a class of planets which are particularly effective at transporting minor bodies towards white dwarfs and subsequently polluting their atmospheres with observable…
Current searches for extrasolar planets have concentrated on observing the reflex Doppler shift of solar-type stars. Little is known, however, about planetary systems around non-solar-type stars. We suggest a new method to extend planetary…