Liberating exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

Payne, Matthew J.; Veras, Dimitri; Holman, Matthew J.; Gänsicke, B. T.

doi:10.1093/mnras/stv2966

Cited by 95 publications

(66 citation statements)

References 93 publications

(136 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…2 reveals the different possible qualitative outcomes, as a function of separation from parent planet. Because many moons remain bound, over a wide range of r/r H , at 10 8 yr, they will be susceptible to liberation if further planet-planet scattering encounters occur (Payne et al 2016). As planet-planet scattering around WDs can occur over Gyr time-scales (far longer than examined here, see fig.…”

Section: N U M E R I C a L I N T E G R At I O N R E S U Lt Smentioning

confidence: 75%

“…Io, Europa and Ganymede, and Mimas and Tethys). Also irrelevant are long-range interactions between planets, as they have been demonstrated (Payne et al 2013) to have little effect on the stability of moons: it is the hard scattering between planets that causes the liberation of moons (Payne et al 2016). …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Note that in Payne et al (2016), we illustrated the range of moon semimajor axes (with respect to their parent planets) from which planet-planet scattering can efficiently cause moons to be liberated from their parent planet into heliocentric orbits. A future study will provide additional details of the exact dependences of this liberation on the properties of the scattering planets as well as the initial orbits of the moons.…”

Section: New Integrationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…The initial semimajor axis of the moon with respect to the planet, a m , in units of the parent planet's instantaneous Hill radius, r H , is chosen randomly such that the distribution of the semimajor axes is uniform in logspace in the range 0.04 < a m /r H < 0.4. Although we know from Payne et al (2016) that moons can be liberated even from orbits with a m /r H < 10 −2 , here we are particularly interested in the fate of moons once liberated, rather than the fine details of which moons in particular will be liberated. As such, we choose to focus our attention on moons which occupy orbits with semimajor axes in the range 0.04 < a m /r H < 0.4.…”

Section: Moon Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, moons liberated during planet-planet scattering in white dwarf systems, a common phenomenon (Payne et al 2016), may change this general picture in two ways: (1) the moons themselves might accrete directly on to the white dwarf, or (2) the moons can become minor planets and change the efficiency with which asteroids can be perturbed on to the white dwarf. Regarding the first point, the internal composition of the moons may be similar to those of the asteroid families inferred from the polluted debris.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

The fate of exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

Payne

Veras

Gänsicke

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Roughly 1000 white dwarfs are known to be polluted with planetary material, and the progenitors of this material are typically assumed to be asteroids. The dynamical architectures which perturb asteroids into white dwarfs are still unknown, but may be crucially dependent on moons liberated from parent planets during post-main-sequence gravitational scattering. Here, we trace the fate of these exomoons, and show that they more easily achieve deep radial incursions towards the white dwarf than do scattered planets. Consequently, moons are likely to play a significant role in white dwarf pollution, and in some cases may be the progenitors of the pollution itself.

show abstract

Section: N U M E R I C a L I N T E G R At I O N R E S U Lt Smentioning

confidence: 75%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: New Integrationsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Moon Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

The fate of exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

Payne

Veras

Gänsicke

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Transiting Disintegrating Planetary Debris Around WD 1145+017

Vanderburg¹,

Rappaport²

2017

Handbook of Exoplanets

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

More than a decade after astronomers realized that disrupted planetary material likely pollutes the surfaces of many white dwarf stars, the discovery of transiting debris orbiting the white dwarf WD 1145+017 has opened the door to new explorations of this process. We describe the observational evidence for transiting planetary material and the current theoretical understanding (and in some cases lack thereof) of the phenomenon. OverviewA bit more than a decade after astronomers first began to suspect that white dwarf stars occasionally disrupt and accrete asteroids and small planets from their primordial planetary systems (Debes and Sigurdsson 2002;Jura 2003), an impressive body of evidence had emerged in support of this scenario. In early 2015, it was known that (a) a large fraction of white dwarf stars (between 25% and 50%) are "polluted" with trace amounts of elements like silicon, iron, calcium and magnesium in their atmospheres (Zuckerman et al. 2010;Koester et al. 2014), (b) many of these polluted white dwarfs also showed evidence of warm rocky material orbiting the star in a debris disk (Barber et al. 2012), and (c) the abundance ratios of heavy elements in the atmospheres of white dwarfs very closely matched the abundance patterns in rocky bodies in the solar system (Zuckerman et al. 2007;Farihi et al. 2013).The generally accepted explanation for these observations was that these polluted white dwarfs host planetary systems which at least partially survived the white dwarf progenitor's evolution off the main sequence. The host star's evolution was not without ill effects: as the host shed its outer layers and began to cool and contract into a white dwarf, the star's mass loss caused changes to the planetary system's dynamics. Numerical simulations have shown that planetary systems whose host stars have undergone this type of mass loss can occasionally perturb small planets or asteroids into highly eccentric orbits which can occasionally have periastron passages close enough to the host star (by this time a white dwarf) to be tidally disrupted. The planetary, lunar (Payne et al. 2016), or asteroidal remnants would then be pulverized into a fine dust (causing the infrared excesses observed around many polluted white dwarf stars) and slowly accreted onto the white dwarf's surface, where the constituent elements would manifest themselves by the presence of spectral lines.However, the evidence for this scenario was entirely circumstantial, relying on analysis of the after-effects of planetary disruption. There were occasional detections of transient events indicating possible tidal disruptions in progress (Del Santo et al. 2014;Xu and Jura 2014), but no unambiguous detections of disintegrating rocky material until the discovery of transits around a polluted white dwarf called WD 1145+017. For the first time, astronomers had definitively observed the transient process of a white dwarf tidally disrupting a large rocky body (planet, moon, or asteroid),

show abstract

Transiting Disintegrating Planetary Debris Around WD 1145+017

Vanderburg

Rappaport

2018

Handbook of Exoplanets

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Liberating exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

Cited by 95 publications

References 93 publications

The fate of exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

The fate of exomoons in white dwarf planetary systems

Transiting Disintegrating Planetary Debris Around WD 1145+017

Transiting Disintegrating Planetary Debris Around WD 1145+017

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About