Other
Scientific paper
Sep 2011
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011ess.....2.3006f&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, ESS meeting #2, #30.06
Other
Scientific paper
Recent and ongoing work has demonstrated that empirical constraints on the frequency and chemistry of rocky planet formation around other stars, and signatures of water therein, can be found via the asteroidal debris orbiting and polluting white dwarf stars. These stellar remnants yield observable information that can be acquired no other way: the frequency, bulk chemical composition, and minimum mass of rocky minor planets around other stars. Asteroids are ancient planetesimals, the building blocks of the terrestrial planets. In the Solar System, we indirectly measure the composition of asteroids by studying meteorites. Analogously, we can obtain a picture of terrestrial planet formation at A- and F-type stars by studying the composition of extant asteroids as they fall onto and chemically pollute their white dwarf remnants. Critically, it is possible to identify significant amounts of water in these asteroidal systems, providing an indication of (current or prior) habitable environments as well as extrasolar testing grounds for models of water delivery to the Earth.
I will present the latest and new developments in this area of research. I hope to include some results of an ongoing HST COS effort to study asteroidal debris as a function of post-main sequence age and main-sequence progenitor mass. Other highlights are two stars polluted by the debris of rocky planetary bodies sufficiently large to have been differentiated, and thus at least as large as Vesta or Ceres, the two largest asteroids in the Solar System. Currently, there is at least one compelling case for the accretion of water-rich, asteroidal debris, while the totality of known polluted white dwarfs hints at a significant population of water-rich asteroid analogs orbiting other stars.
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