Friday, December 08, 2023 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Tatsuya Akiba, CU Boulder

"Hungry, Hungry White Dwarfs"

Abstract:

Many white dwarfs are actively accreting planetary material by tearing planetesimals apart through their strong tidal gravity. However, how the planetesimals get close enough to the white dwarfs to be disrupted is unknown. Using N-body simulations, we explore the response of the surrounding planetary system as the white dwarf receives a natal kick, a kick caused by anisotropic mass loss during the planetary nebula phase. The kick forms an apse-aligned, eccentric disk in the outer stellar system, and many planetesimals flip to counter-rotating orbits at large semi-major axes. The eccentric disk efficiently and continuously torques planetesimals onto radial, star-grazing orbits. The white dwarf natal kick causes both an initial burst in tidal disruption events and an extended, >100 Myr period of enhanced tidal disruption rates.

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