Sporadic Dips from Extended Debris Transiting the Metal-rich White Dwarf SBSS 1232+563

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 thank the anonymous referee for constructive feedback that helped this work, Tim Cunningham for helpful discussions in the preparation of this manuscript, and J. W. Kuehne for observation support. This material is based upon work supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. 80NSSC23K1068 issued through the Science Mission Directorate. Support for this work was in part provided by NASA TESS Cycle 6 grant 80NSSC24K0878. J.A.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant No. 2234657.

The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising–Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham). 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 paper includes data collected by the TESS mission. Funding for the TESS mission is provided by the NASA's Science Mission Directorate. The CSS survey is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNG05GF22G issued through the Science Mission Directorate Near-Earth Objects Observations Program. The CRTS survey is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant AST-0909182. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at Keck Observatory, which is a private 501(c)3 nonprofit 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.

S.X. is supported by NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. M.L.K. and K.H. acknowledge support from the Wootton Center for Astrophysical Plasma Properties, a U.S. Department of Energy NNSA Stewardship Science Academic Alliance Center of Excellence supported under award numbers DE-NA0003843 and DE-NA0004149, and from the United States Department of Energy under grant DE-SC0010623. K.H. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation grant AST-2108736. This research was improved by discussions at the KITP Program "White Dwarfs as Probes of the Evolution of Planets, Stars, the Milky Way and the Expanding Universe" supported by National Science Foundation under grant No. NSF PHY-1748958.

Facilities

PO:1.2m, ATLAS, Gaia, PS1, SO:1m, Sloan, LCOGT, WISE, NEOWISE, Struve, TESS, HET, Hale, Keck:I.

Software References

astrobase (W. Bhatti et al. 2018), astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), astroquery (A. Ginsburg et al. 2019), cecilia (M. Badenas-Agusti et al. 2024), lmfit (M. Newville et al. 2014), Matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), NumPy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), pandas (pandas development team 2020), SciPy (P. Virtanen et al. 2020), Period04 (P. Lenz & M. Breger 2005), phot2lc (Z. Vanderbosch 2023), and TESS_localize (M. E. Higgins & K. J. Bell 2023).