Related papers: White dwarf planetary systems in the ultraviolet
Planetary material accreted by white dwarfs provides unique insights regarding exoplanetary composition. The evolutionary pathways of planetary bodies around white dwarfs are crucial to understanding the presence of close-in planetary…
With recent observations confirming exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs, there is growing interest in exploring and quantifying the habitability of temperate rocky planets around white dwarfs. In this work, the limits of the habitable zone of…
White dwarfs are the end state of most stars, including the Sun, after they exhaust their nuclear fuel. Between 1/4 and 1/2 of white dwarfs have elements heavier than helium in their atmospheres, even though these elements should rapidly…
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…
Gaseous and dust debris disks around white dwarfs (WDs) are formed from tidally disrupted planetary bodies. This offers an opportunity to determine the composition of exoplanetary material by measuring element abundances in the accreting…
Far-ultraviolet (FUV) radiation is a driving source of photochemistry in planetary atmospheres. Proper interpretation of atmospheric observations requires a full understanding of the radiation environment that a planet is exposed to. Using…
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…
Most of low- and intermediate-mass stars that populate the Universe will end their lives as white dwarf stars. These ancient stellar remnants have encrypted inside a precious record of the evolutionary history of the progenitor stars,…
Planet frequency shows a strong positive correlation with host mass from the hydrogen-burning limit to M ~ 2Msun. No search has yet been conducted for planets of higher-mass hosts because all existing techniques are insensitive to these…
White dwarfs are the dense, burnt-out remnants of the vast majority of stars, condemned to cool over billions of years as they steadily radiate away their residual thermal energy. To first order, their atmosphere is expected to be made…
We use star counts from 13 deep HST fields imaged with the {\it Wide Field Camera - 2} in order to constrain the amount of dark matter in the Galaxy that can be in the form of low-mass main sequence stars or white-dwarfs. Based on the…
White dwarfs with a F, G or K type companion represent the last common ancestor for a plethora of exotic systems throughout the galaxy, though to this point very few of them have been fully characterised in terms of orbital period and…
The persistence of planetary systems after their host stars evolve into their post-main sequence phase is poorly constrained by observations. Many young white dwarf systems exhibit infrared excess emission and/or spectral absorption lines…
Planetary systems commonly survive the evolution of single stars, as evidenced by terrestrial-like planetesimal debris observed orbiting and polluting the surfaces of white dwarfs. This letter reports the identification of a circumbinary…
The ultraviolet (UV) light from a host star influences a planet's atmospheric photochemistry and will affect interpretations of exoplanetary spectra from future missions like the James Webb Space Telescope. These effects will be…
A significant fraction of white dwarfs (WDs) are observed to be polluted with metals despite high surface gravities and short settling times. The current theoretical model for this pollution is accretion of rocky bodies delivered to the WD…
The relative abundance of deuterium and hydrogen is a potent tracer of planet formation and evolution. Jupiter and Saturn have protosolar atmospheric D/H ratios, a relic of substantial gas accretion from the nebula, while the atmospheres of…
There are a few different mechanisms that can cause white dwarf stars to vary in brightness, providing opportunities to probe the physics, structures, and formation of these compact stellar remnants. The observational characteristics of the…
The chemical and mass evolution of exoplanet atmospheres is shaped by their specific X-ray through ultraviolet (5 - 3200 Angstroms) irradiance history. X-ray and EUV (5 - 911 Angstroms) radiation largely contributes to atmospheric heating…
The vast majority of stars that populate the Universe will end their evolution as white-dwarf stars. Applications of white dwarfs include cosmochronology, evolution of planetary systems, and also as laboratories to study non-standard…