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Abstract
ABSTRACT We obtained high-speed photometry of the disintegrating planetesimals orbiting the white dwarf WD 1145+017, spanning a period of four weeks. The light curves show a dramatic evolution of the system since the first observations obtained about seven months ago. Multiple transit events are detected in every light curve, which have varying durations (≃3–12 minutes) and depths (≃10%–60%). The time-averaged extinction is ≃11%, much higher than at the time of the Kepler observations. The shortest-duration transits require that the occulting cloud of debris has a few times the size of the white dwarf, longer events are often resolved into the superposition of several individual transits. The transits evolve on timescales of days, both in shape and in depth, with most of them gradually appearing and disappearing over the course of the observing campaign. Several transits can be tracked across multiple nights, all of them recur on periods of ≃4.49 hr, indicating multiple planetary debris fragments on nearly identical orbits. Identifying the specific origin of these bodies within this planetary system, and the evolution leading to their current orbits remains a challenging problem.
Highlights
Planets around main-sequence stars are ubiquitous (Cassan et al 2012; Fressin et al 2013), and a significant fraction of them are predicted to survive the giant branch evolution of their host stars (Mustill & Villaver 2012; Veras et al 2013)
Little is known so far regarding the detailed nature of the disrupted objects, the exact origin within their planetary systems, and the processes resulting in their disintegration and subsequent circularization (Debes et al 2012; Veras et al 2014b, 2015c) and leading to dusty debris disks with typical radii of ;1 R, which have been detected as infrared excess to ;40 white dwarfs (Rocchetto et al 2015)
We report the first high-speed photometry of the transits at WD 1145+017, which show a dramatic evolution of the system in the seven months since the observations of Vanderburg et al (2015) and Croll et al (2015) and suggest a rapid evolution of the planetesimals and their debris
Summary
Planets around main-sequence stars are ubiquitous (Cassan et al 2012; Fressin et al 2013), and a significant fraction of them are predicted to survive the giant branch evolution of their host stars (Mustill & Villaver 2012; Veras et al 2013) This expectation is corroborated by the detection of debris accreted into the photospheres of white dwarfs, resulting from the tidal disruption (Debes & Sigurdsson 2002; Jura 2003) of planetary bodies among ;25%–50% of all white dwarfs (Zuckerman et al 2003; Koester et al 2014). We report the first high-speed photometry of the transits at WD 1145+017, which show a dramatic evolution of the system in the seven months since the observations of Vanderburg et al (2015) and Croll et al (2015) and suggest a rapid evolution of the planetesimals and their debris
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