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Published December 1, 2014 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

A Search for Planetary Eclipses of White Dwarfs in the Pan-STARRS1 Medium-Deep Fields

Abstract

We present a search for eclipses of ~1700 white dwarfs (WDs) in the Pan-STARRS1 medium-deep fields. Candidate eclipse events are selected by identifying low outliers in over 4.3 million light curve measurements. We find no short-duration eclipses consistent with being caused by a planetary size companion. This large data set enables us to place strong constraints on the close-in planet occurrence rates around WDs for planets as small as 2 R⊕. Our results indicate that gas giant planets orbiting just outside the Roche limit are rare, occurring around less than 0.5% of WDs. Habitable-zone super-Earths and hot super-Earths are less abundant than similar classes of planets around main-sequence stars. These constraints provide important insight into the ultimate fate of the large population of exoplanets orbiting main-sequence stars.

Additional Information

© 2014 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 June 27; accepted 2014 September 21; published 2014 November 13. The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) have been made possible through the contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, and Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE). Support for this work was provided by National Science Foundation grant AST-1009749. Finally, we thank Professor Andrew Gould for his critical review and extremely helpful suggestions that greatly enhanced the quality of this work.

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Published - Fulton_2014_ApJ_796_114.pdf

Accepted Version - 1410.0052.pdf

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