Search for Giant Planets around White Dwarfs with HST, Spitzer, and VLT

Abstract

For the last three years we have performed a survey for young (<3 Gyrs) giant planets around nearby white dwarfs with HST, Spitzer, and VLT. Direct HST/NICMOS imaging of the seven white dwarfs in the Hyades gave no evidence for companions down to about 10 Jupiter masses and separations larger than 0.5 arcsec (about 25 AU), while VLT/NACO observations revealed a putative companion to a field white dwarf. Second epoch observations with SINFONI on the VLT, however, showed that it is most probably a background star. With IRAC on Spitzer we also found no indications of cool, very low mass companions in our sample of field white dwarfs. The implications of these non-detections are briefly discussed.