Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter ExoPlanets

Wednesday, 17 September 2025, 17:09

Characterising exoplanets around white dwarfs

Louise D. Nielsen, Emily Rickman, Laura Rogers and John Debes
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (and more)

Thousands of the exoplanets we presently know will be engulfed as their host star evolves into a red giant and subsequently becomes a white dwarf (WD). Planets farther out in the system can survive this event and later perturb planetesimals onto star-grazing orbits, which accrete onto the WD. There are few observations of tidally disrupted small bodies transiting WDs, but no confirmed intact planets have been detected around WDs. In this talk, I will present the high-resolution spectroscopic campaign with ESPRESSO at the VLT of WD0141. A custom approach to extract radial velocities from the spectra allows us to constrain the motion of the stellar remnant to unprecedented precision. For WD 0141, we can exclude the presence of close-in (<100 days) giant planets. This work paves the way for future exoplanet detections around WDs, including candidates from Gaia DR4 astrometry and JWST infrared excess surveys.