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Absence of a correlation between white dwarf planetary accretion and primordial stellar metallicity.
- Source :
-
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . 7/25/2024, Vol. 532 Issue 1, p394-410. 17p. - Publication Year :
- 2024
-
Abstract
- Over a quarter of white dwarfs have photospheric metal pollution, which is evidence for recent accretion of exoplanetary material. While a wide range of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this pollution, there are currently few observational constraints to differentiate between them. To investigate the driving mechanism, we observe a sample of polluted and non-polluted white dwarfs in wide binary systems with main-sequence stars. Using the companion stars' metallicities as a proxy for the white dwarfs' primordial metallicities, we compare the metallicities of polluted and non-polluted systems. Because there is a well-known correlation between giant planet occurrence and higher metallicity (with a stronger correlation for close-in and eccentric planets), these metallicity distributions can be used to probe the role of gas giants in white dwarf accretion. We find that the metallicity distributions of polluted and non-polluted systems are consistent with the hypothesis that both samples have the same underlying metallicity distribution. However, we note that this result is likely biased by several selection effects. Additionally, we find no significant trend between white dwarf accretion rates and metallicity. These findings suggest that giant planets are not the dominant cause of white dwarf accretion events in binary systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Subjects :
- *GAS giants
*BINARY stars
*WHITE dwarf stars
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 00358711
- Volume :
- 532
- Issue :
- 1
- Database :
- Academic Search Index
- Journal :
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
- Publication Type :
- Academic Journal
- Accession number :
- 178506135
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1506