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A power-law decay evolution scenario for polluted single white dwarfs

Nature Astronomy volume 3, pages 69–75 (2019)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 19 November 2018

This article has been updated

Abstract

Planetary systems can survive stellar evolution, as is clear from the atmospheric metal pollution and circumstellar dusty disks of single white dwarfs1,2. Recent observations show that 1−4% of single white dwarfs are accompanied by dusty disks3,4,5,6, while the occurrence rate of metal pollution is about 25–50%1,7,8. Dusty disks and metal pollution have been associated with accretion of remanent planetary systems around white dwarfs1,9, yet the relationship between these two phenomena is still unclear. Here, we suggest an evolutionary scenario to link the dusty disk and metal pollution. By analysing a sample of metal-polluted white dwarfs, we find that the mass accretion rate onto the white dwarf generally follows a broken power-law decay, which matches well with the theoretical prediction, assuming that dust accretion is primarily driven by Poynting–Robertson drag10 and the dust source is primarily delivered via dynamically falling asteroids perturbed by a Jovian planet11,12. The presence of disks is mainly at the early stage (tcool ~ 0.1−0.7 Gyr) of the whole process of metal pollution, which is detectable until ~8 Gyr, naturally explaining the fraction (~2–16%) of metal-polluted white dwarfs with dusty disks. The success of this scenario also implies that the configuration of an asteroid belt with an outer gas giant might be common around stars of several solar masses.

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Fig. 1: Power-law relationship derived from the observational data.
Fig. 2: A power-law decay evolution scenario for polluted white dwarfs.
Fig. 3: An evolution diagram for the tidally disrupted asteroid model.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding authors.

Change history

  • 19 November 2018

    The version of this Letter originally published had the following errors in the reference list, all of which have now been corrected.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank S.-Y. Xu and D. Koester for discussions and suggestions. They also thank the MWDD for useful data and evolutionary models of white dwarfs. This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (numbers 11333002, 11661161014, 11503009 and 11673011). J.-W. X. acknowledges the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of the People’s Republic of China (number 10284201426) and the LAMOST Fellowship. The LAMOST Fellowship is supported by Special Funding for Advanced Users, budgeted and administrated by the Center for Astronomical Mega-Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Astronomy and Space Science, Key Laboratory of Ministry of Education, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China

    Di-Chang Chen, Ji-Lin Zhou, Ji-Wei Xie, Ming Yang, Hui Zhang, Hui-Gen Liu, En-Si Liang, Zhou-Yi Yu & Jia-Yi Yang

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Contributions

J.-L.Z. and D.-C.C. came up with the idea. D.-C.C., J.-W.X. and M.Y. investigated the observation data and pertinent literature. J.-W.X., D.-C.C and H.Z. conducted the data analysis. D.-C.C. and Z.-Y.Y. conducted the simulations and calculations. J.-L.Z., J.-W.X. and D.-C.C. wrote the paper. M.Y., H.Z., E.-S.L. and J.-Y.Y. participated in revision of the paper.

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Correspondence to Ji-Lin Zhou or Ji-Wei Xie.

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Supplementary Figures 1–10, Supplementary Tables 1–3, Supplementary References 1–32

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Chen, DC., Zhou, JL., Xie, JW. et al. A power-law decay evolution scenario for polluted single white dwarfs. Nat Astron 3, 69–75 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-018-0609-7

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