Planetary debris disks around hot white dwarfs - dusty extensions to hot gaseous disks

Details Planetary debris disks around hot white dwarfs - dusty extensions to hot gaseous disks Planetary debris disks around hot white dwarfs - dusty extensions to hot gaseous disks

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008sptz.prop50118b&link_type=abstract

Spitzer Proposal ID #50118

Physics

Scientific paper

While >250 extrasolar planets orbiting main sequence stars have been discovered, the destiny of planetary systems through the late stages of evolution of their host stars is very uncertain, and no planet has ever been found around a white dwarf. We identified metal-rich gas disks around two relatively young white dwarfs, SDSS 1228+1040 and SDSS 1043+0855. The likely origin of such a disk is a tidally disrupted asteroid, which has been destabilised from its initial orbit of more than 1000 solar radii by interaction with a relatively massive planetessimal or planet. Our Spitzer Cycle 4 photometry of SDSS 1228+1040 detected a cool, dusty extension to the warm gaseous disk. Preliminary modelling of the infrared excess suggests that it cannot be modelled with a single optically-thick or -thin dusty debris disk, but instead requires a two-stage disk, with an optically thick inner disk, and an optically thin cooler outer disk. Intriguingly, the SED increased faster towards 16 microns than we expected, and our modelling suggests that the disk cannot be continuous, but must have a gap of about 100 Earth-radii between the optically thick and optically thin disks. The most likely mechanism for clearing a gap in a dust disk is the presence of a planetessimal still intact around the star. Here we propose to observe this disk at longer wavelengths to further constrain our model and confirm the presence of this gap in the disk, and to carry out a similar study on a third, almost identical hot, single WD recently identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

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