Exoplanets around white dwarf stars are particularly hard to find. But a new method involving the James Webb Space Telescope could soon reveal them.
The Solar System is surrounded by a colorful array of stellar neighbors. Within about 30 light years of here, there are 74 main sequence stars, 284 red dwarf stars and 21 white dwarfs.
So astronomers would dearly love to have another way to look for exoplanets around white dwarfs, particular those 21 neighbors that are tantalizingly close.Now Mary Anne Limbach at Texas A&M University at College Station and colleagues have developed an entirely new way to find exoplanets orbiting white dwarfs using the James Webb Space Telescope.
The second main technique measures the way a star wobbles as planets orbit around it. This radial velocity change shifts the spectrum of the star, which astronomers can see by looking at the various spikes and dips in the spectrum to see how they move. So Limbach and co imagined that in some circumstances it might be possible to see this infrared exoplanet spectrum superimposed on the featureless black body spectrum of the white dwarf. The recently launched James Webb Space Telescope is ideally suited to this kind of observation because it is tuned into the infrared part of the spectrum.
Finally, they simulated how the spectrum from an exoplanet atmosphere filled with biosignatures such as methane, ozone and water would look and whether they could also be observed.
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