Speaker
Alexander Mustill
(Lund University)
Description
When stars evolve, their expanding radii should destroy all planets, asteroids and comets within a few astronomical units. However, many white dwarfs show evidence of planetary material on very short-period (<~1 day) orbits, or deposited into the stellar atmosphere, giving insight into the end states of planetary systems like our own. I will present an overview of our understanding of such systems, and some recent results on photometric monitoring of transits of the WD1054-226 system which shows complex light curves suggesting a resonant disc-asteroid interaction (Farihi et al., 2022; Korth, Mustill et al., submitted).