Related papers: Imaging planets around nearby white dwarfs
Context. Though only a handful of extrasolar planets have been discovered via direct imaging, each of these discoveries had tremendous impact on our understanding of planetary formation, stellar formation and cool atmosphere physics. Aims.…
White dwarf stars are the most common endpoint of stellar evolution. Therefore, these old, numerous and compact objects provide valuable information on the late stages of stellar evolution, the physics of dense plasma and the structure and…
Exoplanetary science has reached a historic moment. The James Webb Space Telescope will be capable of probing the atmospheres of rocky planets, and perhaps even search for biologically produced gases. However this is contingent on…
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…
Substellar objects such as brown dwarfs and planets are generally expected to remain detached from their main-sequence host stars unless orbital decay or stellar expansion brings them into contact, leading to rapid engulfment and…
The potential existence of a giant planet orbiting within a few AU of a stellar remnant has profound implications for both the survival and possible regeneration of planets during post-main sequence stellar evolution. This paper reports…
Despite the revolution in our knowledge resulting from the detection of planets around mature stars, we know almost nothing about planets orbiting young stars because rapid rotation and active photospheres preclude detection by radial…
The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…
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…
Recent radial velocity observations have indicated that Jovian-type planets can exist in moderately close binary star systems. Numerical simulations of the dynamical stability of terrestrial-class planets in such environments have shown…
The masses of compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are fundamental to astrophysics, but very difficult to measure. We present the results of an analysis of subluminous B (sdB) stars in close binary systems with…
Cold Jovian planets play an important role in sculpting the dynamical environment in which inner terrestrial planets form. The core accretion model predicts that giant planets cannot form around low-mass M dwarfs, although this idea has…
White dwarfs with emission lines from gaseous debris discs are among the rarest examples of planetary remnant hosts, but at the same time they are key objects for studying the final evolutionary stage of planetary systems. Making use of the…
The occurrence rate of young giant planets from direct imaging surveys is a fundamental tracer of the efficiency with which planets form and migrate at wide orbital distances. These measurements have progressively converged to a value of…
The study of dwarf galaxies in groups is a powerful tool for investigating galaxy evolution, chemical enrichment and environmental effects on these objects. Here we present results obtained for dwarf galaxies in the Centaurus A complex, a…
Brown dwarfs occupy the important region in the mass range between stars and planets. Their existence, ambigious until only recently, and their properties give insight into stellar and planetary formation. We present statistical results of…
Exoplanets which are detected using the radial velocity technique have a well-known ambiguity of their true mass, caused by the unknown inclination of the planetary orbit with respect to the plane of the sky. Constraints on the inclination…
At wide separations, planetary-mass and brown dwarf companions to solar type stars occupy a curious region of parameters space not obviously linked to binary star formation or solar-system scale planet formation. These companions provide…
Surveys of nearby field stars indicate that stellar binaries are common, yet little is known about the effects that these companions may have on planet formation and evolution. The Friends of Hot Jupiters project uses three complementary…
The masses of compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are fundamental to astrophysics, but very difficult to measure. We present the results of an analysis of subluminous B (sdB) stars in close binary systems with…