Transiting Planetary Debris near the Roche Limit of a White Dwarf on a 4.97 hr Orbit—and its Vanishing

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We first extend our gratitude to our anonymous referee, whose careful review and recommendations enhanced this manuscript. In fruitful conversations and correspondence with Tim Cunningham, Jay Farihi, Jim Fuller, Philip Muirhead, Saul Rappaport, Siyi Xu (许偲艺), and Nadia Zakamska, we found guidance that improved our interpretation of these results. We are deeply grateful for the observing support by John Kuehne at McDonald Observatory and Colt Pauley at the Perkins Telescope Observatory. This material is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. 80NSSC23K1068 issued through the Science Mission Directorate. J.A.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. 2234657.

This worked is based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants No. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, University of Warwick, Ruhr University, Cornell University, Northwestern University and Drexel University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

Some of the data presented herein were obtained at Keck Observatory, which is a private 501(c)3 non-profit organization operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the Native Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

This publication also makes use of data products from NEOWISE, which is a project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the Planetary Science Division of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which was operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by 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, the 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 grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

This research relied upon the SIMBAD and VizieR databases operated by CDS (Strasbourg, France) and the bibliographic resources of The SAO Astrophysics Data System.

Facilities

PO:1.2m - Palomar Observatory's 1.2 meter Samuel Oschin Telescope (Zwicky Transient Facility) - , Hale (CHIMERA, DBSP), Struve - McDonald Observatory's 2.1m Otto Struve Telescope(ProEM), Perkins - Lowell Observatory's 72in Perkins Telescope (PRISM), LDT - (LMI), Keck:I - KECK I Telescope (LRIS), Gaia - , PS1 - Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System Telescope #1 (Pan-STARRS), Spitzer (IRAC) - , WISE - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.

Software References

Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018, 2022), astroquery (A. Ginsburg et al. 2019), ccdproc (M. Craig et al. 2017), cuvarbase (J. Hoffman 2022), extinction (K. Barbary 2016), hipercam (V. S. Dhillon et al. 2021), lmfit (M. Newville et al. 2014), matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), pandas (The pandas Development Team 2025), phot2lc (Z. Vanderbosch 2023), photutils (L. Bradley et al. 2024), Pyriod (K. Bell 2022), scipy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020).