Spitzer planet limits around the pulsating white dwarf GD66

Creators: Mullally, Fergal; Reach, William T.; Degennaro, Steven; Burrows, Adam

Abstract

We present infrared observations in search of a planet around the white dwarf, GD66. Time-series photometry of GD66 shows a variation in the arrival time of stellar pulsations consistent with the presence of a planet with mass ≥2.4 MJ. Any such planet is too close to the star to be resolved, but the planet's light can be directly detected as an excess flux at 4.5 μm. We observed GD66 with the two shorter wavelength channels of the Infrared Array Camera on Spitzer but did not find strong evidence of a companion, placing an upper limit of 5-7 MJ on the mass of the companion, assuming an age of 1.2-1.7 Gyr.

Additional Information

© 2009 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2008 October 20; accepted 2008 December 17; published 2009 March 16. We thank Mike Montgomery for donating some of the telescope time used to make ground-based observations in this work. We thank Detlev Koester for the use of his atmosphere models. We also thank D. E. Winget, Ted von Hippel, Mukremin Kilic, and Marc Kuchner for their assistance at various stages of this project. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech.

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