Laura Rogers

A picture of Laura Rogers next to the Space Drafts #106 logo and underneath Laura's talk title: "Dead Planets Around Dead Stars".

Space Drafts #105 is happening TONIGHT (4/15) at 7:30pm Tucson time at Borderlands Brewing Downtown and bit.ly/SpaceDrafts106. Dr. Laura Rogers (@astroloz.bsky.social) from NSF NOIRLab will be talking about dead planets around dead stars and then we have trivia!

First day as a postdoc at NoirLab in Tucson today, keen to connect with US researchers and if anyone wants a talk about white dwarf planetary systems let me know! 🔭🪐

Simultaneous emission from dust and gas in the planetary debris orbiting a white dwarf There is increasing evidence for the presence and variability of circumstellar dust and gas around white dwarfs that are polluted with exoplanetary material, although the origin of this dust and gas r...

New paper out today where we find simultaneous dust and gas emission in the disc surrounding a white dwarf star - this tells us that the dust and gas must be produced together around this white dwarf - more details here: arxiv.org/abs/2412.07647

Such a great astrobite on our recent paper! Pollution is definitely not all bad :)

‪And, one of the teams was formed at the last EuroWD conference 2 years ago, so it seems fitting that we find out we got accepted during this year’s EuroWD conference! ‬

It’s a great day to wake up as PI of 2 new Hubble programs! Bring on the white dwarf science! 🎉

Some great arxiv papers for April fools day, my favourite this year is ‘multi-messenger astrology’ - arxiv.org/abs/2403.19749

Zach Vanderbosch has the final talk of #DustDevils24 who is presenting a census of white dwarfs hosting transiting planetary debris, there are now 21 systems split into two categories: those near/within the Roche radius and those beyond the Roche radius

Akshay Robert talks about the frequency of transiting planetary systems around polluted white dwarfs by searching for transits in the TESS lightcurves and found a planet fraction of 0.8%. Also finds short-period Kronian planets are unlikely to occur around WDs #DustDevils24

I am up next talking about the white dwarf opportunity: which rocks and minerals make up a planet? #DustDevils24

Jay Farihi talks about dust disc observations over the years from early observations of Spitzer to brand new JWST spectra #DustDevils24

Ayaka Okuya talks about modelling white dwarf dust disks. There is excess NIR emission, if you add amorphous carbon the increase in the NIR radiation is negligible, but adding metallic Fe does increase the NIR radiation #DustDevils24

Érika Le Bourdais talks about improving models of WD1145, a polluted white dwarf with a circumstellar disk. Érika has a disk model and a white dwarf model and discovers 18 elements in the planetary material that accreted onto WD1145 (8 new) and it resembles CI chondrites #DustDevils24

Final talk of session 1 from Gergely Hajdu who presents work on RR Lyrae stars, when looking at 27,000 RRL lightcurves, found 87 candidate binaries, and in doing so additionally found that some change mean brightness with time #DustDevils24

Brenda Matthews talks about a survey of 23 GPI imaged disks showing outliers with lots of asymmetries, and some show examples of planet-disk interactions. More results are presented in Brenda’s advisees papers: Crotts et al. 2022 and 2023 #DustDevils24

They grind the sample to dust and use laboratory equipment to measure the absorption spectra. The shock going through the atmosphere doesn’t propagate to the interior so the material composition is preserved :)

Jonathan Marshall talks about searching for variable near and mid infrared photometry and finds with NEOWISE photometry a handful of new variable candidates within 200pc volume (and confirms some already known variable systems) #DustDevils24

Kate Su talks about extreme debris disks and new JWST data that shows some extreme debris disks have mid-infrared features dominated by silica dust and some by forsterite dust, all a work in progress and we look forward to the conclusions in the next meeting! :) #dustDevils24

Andrew Swan kicks off the final day of #DustDevils24 with a review on Extreme Debris Disks (those systems with fractional luminosities > 1%) - including lots of fun information on white dwarf disks, a topic close to my heart

William C. Danchi talking about the MATISSE instrument and its capabilities for detections of discs, and spoke about recent mid-infrared studies of HD 144432 that find iron-rich dust fits better to the mid infrared data than carbon rich dust #DustDevils24

Vasuda Trehan talks about predictive models that can be used to work out if a planet is habitable or not. These trained machine learning models can be used to predict the conditions of the habitable zone and quantify/model the effects of exozodiacal dust #DustDevils24

Philippe Priolet talks about VLTI observations of Beta Pic which detects circumstellar emission in the L band and modelling of the dust which provides spatial constraints on the data #DustDevils24

Thomas Stuber talks about how large dust grains could have a significant impact on the observational appearance of host dust and therefore should be considered when modelling exozodiacal dust #DustDevils24

Kevin Ollmann talks about how hot exozodiacal dust has an impact on close-in exoplanets for certain dust grain radii, larger dust mass, and certain phase angles, but there are different polarimetric signatures for hot exozodiacal dust and close-in planets

Post coffee break, Germain Garreau talks about constraining the exozodiacal dust disk around θ Boo with the LBTI. Modelling of 3 observations show changes that may be due to outside dust moving to the habitable zone via PR drag #DustDevils24

Mark Wyatt on where is the exozodi dust coming from? Wyatt 2005 paper says PR drag not important, but new and improved models say it seems to be. To test models looked at the dust distribution in Fomalhaut - it is consistent with PR drag #DustDevils24

Yu-Chia Lin on how dust within the inner working angle can impact observations using high contrast imaging, and a correction factor is needed which depends on the design of the coronagraph and the observed wavelength #DustDevils24

John Debes on how we need to understand exozodis more as they have significant impacts on direct imaging surveys for habitable zone planets. Architectures will be picked soon for e.g. Habitable Worlds Observatory so it is important to focus on understanding exozodis - see the upcoming SAG 23 report

Back after lunch with a session on Exozodiacal Dust, Virginie Faramaz started off with a great review talk on the topic #DustDevils24

Sai Krishanth Pulikesi Mannan discussing how Non-Negative Matrix Factorisation (NMF) is better for debris discs as you get a better contrast, SNR, throughput, and it conserves morphology better. NMF is computationally difficult but if you use GPUs then it is easier/more feasible #DustDevils24