XXIX WS2017
Applications of

Radiative Transfer

to stellar and planetary atmospheres
Tenerife, Spain - 13-17 Nov. 2017

Poster abstract details

Gaseous disks in white dwarfs
Leila Saker, Luciano García, Mercedes Gómez

Abstract

In recent years, thanks to Spitzer and WISE, the number of white dwarfs (WDs) with IR excesses attributed to the presence of a debris disk, has increased significantly. Additionally, disks of gas were found in a handful of WDs with debris disks, through detection of emission lines of Ca triplet in 860 nm (distinctive of a gas in a Keplerian stable rotating disk). However, not all WDs with debris disk have a gas disk, which suggests that the production mechanism of the gaseous disks is not universal. At the present time, it still remains unknown why WDs of similar characteristics retain their gas disks and other do not, although several scenarios have been proposed. One manner to infer some constrains or hits to help clarify this issue is to analyze and confront significant groups of both types of objects. In this context, we have obtained GMOS/GEMINI optical spectra for a sample of 9 WDs with IR excess, selected from our sample of 29 debris disks WDs, to find the gas counterpart to the dusty disks. We combined our sample with other objects from the literature and analyze the largest available sample to find key characteristics to better understand gas disks in WDs.