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Published March 1, 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

The WIRED Survey. I. A Bright IR Excess due to Dust Around the Heavily Polluted White Dwarf Galex J193156.8+011745

Abstract

With the launch of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a new era of detecting planetary debris around white dwarfs (WDs) has begun with the WISE InfraRed Excesses around Degenerates (WIRED) Survey. The WIRED survey will be sensitive to substellar objects and dusty debris around WDs out to distances exceeding 100 pc, well beyond the completeness level of local WDs and covering a large fraction of known WDs detected with the SDSS DR4 WD catalog. In this paper, we report an initial result of the WIRED survey, the detection of the heavily polluted hydrogen WD (spectral type DAZ) GALEX J193156.8+011745 at 3.35 and 4.6 μm. We find that the excess is consistent with either a narrow dusty ring with an inner radius of 29 RWD, outer radius of 40 RWD, and a face-on inclination, or a disk with an inclination of 70◦, an inner radius of 23 RWD, and an outer radius of 80 RWD. We also report initial optical spectroscopic monitoring of several metal lines present in the photosphere and find no variability in the line strengths or radial velocities of the lines. We rule out all but planetary mass companions to GALEX1931 out to 0.5 AU.

Additional Information

© 2011 American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 October 15; accepted 2010 December 19; published 2011 February 3. Based on data gathered with the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. This research was supported by an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities through a contract with NASA. This work is based on data obtained from (1) the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology (Caltech), funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); (2) the Two Micron All Sky Survey, a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)/Caltech, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation; (3) the Hale Telescope, Palomar Observatory, as part of a continuing collaboration between Caltech, NASA/JPL, and Cornell University; (4) the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile; (5) the ESO Telescopes at the La Silla or Paranal Observatories; (6) the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France; and (7) the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by JPL, Caltech, under a contract with NASA. We thank D. Steeghs for obtaining spectra of GALEX1931 on July 7–8 and N. Morrell for obtaining spectra of GALEX1931 on August 2–3.M.C. thanks NASA for supporting his participation in this work through UCLA Sub- Award 1000-S-MA756 with a UCLA FAU 26311 to MIRA.

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August 22, 2023
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