Circumstellar Debris and Pollution at White Dwarf Stars

By J. Farihi. 2016

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Circumstellar disks of planetary debris are now known or suspected to closely orbit hundreds of white dwarf stars. To date, both data and theory support disks that are entirely contained within the preceding giant stellar radii, and hence must have been produced during the white dwarf phase. This picture is strengthened by the signature of material falling onto the pristine stellar surfaces; disks are always detected together with atmospheric heavy elements. The physical link between this debris and the white dwarf host abundances enables unique insight into the bulk chemistry of extrasolar planetary systems via their remnants. This review summarizes the body of evidence supporting dynamically active planetary systems at a large fraction of all white dwarfs, the remnants of first generation, main-sequence planetary systems, and hence provide insight into initial conditions as well as long-term dynamics and evolution.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdafd99a3b19ae1116b4ce267c8c2ecf0bb245ee

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. L. Althaus
2. M. M. Bertolami
3. S. O. Kepler
4. A. Córsico
5. Pierre Bergeron

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2. A. Córsico
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4. M. M. Bertolami

Citations in the corpus

• Pulsating white dwarfs: new insights (2019, background): “The study of WDs results thus of central relevance for a vast variety of topics of modern astrophysics, ranging from the final fate of planetary systems to the characterization of dark matter (Farihi, 2016; Salaris and Cassisi, 2018).”