Externally Polluted White Dwarfs with Dust Disks

By Michael Jura, J. Farihi, B. Zuckerman. 2007

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report Spitzer Space Telescope photometry of 11 externally polluted white dwarfs. Of the nine stars for which we have IRAC photometry, we find that GD 40, GD 133, and PG 1015+161 each has an infrared excess that can be understood as arising from a flat, opaque, dusty disk. GD 56 also has an infrared excess characteristic of circumstellar dust, but a flat-disk model cannot reproduce the data unless there are grains as warm as 1700 K and perhaps not even then. Our data support the previous suggestion that the metals in the atmosphere of GD 40 are the result of accretion of a tidally disrupted asteroid with a chondritic composition.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bf50374691333ef150eab05663d04168f0d59e61

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. Farihi
2. Michael Jura
3. B. Zuckerman
4. D. Koester
5. B. Gänsicke
6. Kevin J. Walsh
7. T. Tauris
8. P. Marchant

Citations in the corpus

• Circumstellar Debris and Pollution at White Dwarf Stars (2016, methodology): “Generally speaking, the inner disk edges are fairly well constrained by their 2.2 and 3.6 µm emission, with typical allowed ranges of 10% in Tin (and hence inner disk radius), and up to 20% at the extremes of what might be reasonably fitted (Jura et al., 2007a).”
• The chemical diversity of exo-terrestrial planetary debris around white dwarfs (2012, background): “Koester et al. (2005) detected of a photospheric Ca iiK absorption line in the SPY data, with a number abundance log [Ca/H] = −6.3, which triggered follow-up observations with Spitzer that revealed the presence of circumstellar dust (Jura et al. 2007).”
• INFRARED SIGNATURES OF DISRUPTED MINOR PLANETS AT WHITE DWARFS (2009, methodology): “The fractional disk luminosity, τ = LIR/L = 0.02, is about 2/3 that of the disks at G29-38, GD 362, and GD 56 (Farihi et al. 2008b; Jura et al. 2007a).”
• Models of low-mass helium white dwarfs including gravitational settling, thermal and chemical diffusion, and rotational mixing (2016, background): “…WDs, the presence of metals in their atmosphere is explained by accretion from circumstellar debris discs formed by tidal disruption of planetary bodies (e.g. Debes & Sigurdsson 2002; Jura et al. 2007), which are detectable through excess flux in the IR (e.g. Farihi et al. 2009; Kilic et al. 2006).”
• THE LINK BETWEEN PLANETARY SYSTEMS, DUSTY WHITE DWARFS, AND METAL-POLLUTED WHITE DWARFS (2012, background): “Jura (2003) and Jura et al. (2007) have elegantly shown that most white dwarfs with infrared excesses require inner disk radii of just a dozen or so white dwarf radii, or about 0.1 R⊙.”
• The frequency of planetary debris around young white dwarfs (2014, background): “9.6)and WD 1015+161 which also exhibits infrared excess from circumstellar dust (Jura et al. 2007).”
• POLLUTION OF SINGLE WHITE DWARFS BY ACCRETION OF MANY SMALL ASTEROIDS (2008, methodology): “Following Jura et al. (2007b), we compute a model with a flat disk to reproduce the data.”
• The Chemical Composition of an Extrasolar Minor Planet (2007, background): “…dwarf photospheres, dusty orbiting disks were discovered at infrared wavelengths with ground-based telescopes (Zuckerman & Becklin 1987; Kilic et al. 2005; Becklin et al. 2005) and with the Spitzer Space Telescope (Reach et al. 2005; Jura et al. 2007a, 2007b; von Hippel et al. 2007).”