The frequency of planetary debris around young white dwarfs
By D. Koester, B. Gänsicke, J. Farihi. 2014
310 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Context. Heavy metals in the atmospheres of white dwarfs are thought in many cases to be accreted from a circumstellar debris disk, which was formed by the tidal disruption of a rocky planetary body within the Roche radius of the star. The abundance analysis of photospheric elements and conclusions about the chemical composition of the accreted matter are a new and promising method of studying the composition of extrasolar planetary systems. However, ground-based searches for metal-polluted white dwarfs that rely primarily on the detection of the Ca ii K line become insensitive at Teff > 15 000 K because this ionization state depopulates. Aims. We present the results of the first unbiased survey for metal pollution among hydrogen-atmosphere (DA type) white dwarfs with cooling ages in the range 20–200 Myr and 17 000 K 23 000 K, in excellent agreement with the absence of infrared excess from dust around these warmer stars. The median, main sequence progenitor of our sample corresponds to an A-type star of ≈2 M� , and we find 13 of 23 white dwarfs descending from
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b94c7dcbc48e08dd47db4a43ea3f9d021f69a85
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- Magnetic White Dwarfs (2015, background): “Yet, ∼ 25% of all WDs show traces of metals – most commonly Ca and Si, but also Mg, Fe, Na and other elements (Zuckerman et al. 2003; Koester et al. 2014).”
- Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “The hottest WDs (T ∼>20 000 K) can achieve metal levitation (Chayer, Fontaine, & Wesemael, 1995; Chayer, 2014; Koester et al., 2014), but the cooler WDs must have recently accreted the metals (Koester, 2009).”
- AGaiaData Release 2 catalogue of white dwarfs and a comparison with SDSS (2018, background): “…doubledegenerates (Marsh et al. 2004; Parsons et al. 2011), metal polluted white dwarfs (Sion et al. 1990; Zuckerman & Reid 1998; Dufour et al. 2007b; Koester et al. 2014; Raddi et al. 2015) or degenerate stars with dusty or gaseous planetary debris discs (Gänsicke et al. 2006; Farihi et al.…”
- Circumstellar Debris and Pollution at White Dwarf Stars (2016, background): “If one accounts for the youngest cooling ages represented in the Spitzer and parent samples of stars, then it is probably safe to say this result applies to cooling ages of 20 to 500 Myr, as neither metal pollution nor disk detections have yet to occur for hotter white dwarfs (Koester et al., 2014).”