Supervisor : Dr Matt Burleigh(mbu@star.le.ac.uk)

Details of Project

What happens to a solar system like ours when the Sun ends its life, first by expanding into a Red Giant and then finally shedding its outer layers to become a white dwarf? Will the Earth survive? What happens to the outer planets? We have been searching for giant planets and brown dwarfs around white dwarfs through infra-red observations with ground-based 8m telescopes and the Spitzer space telescope. 
We have discovered companions as low in mass as just a few times that of Jupiter, and warm debris disks which we believe are the remains of large extra-solar asteroids. 

In some systems we have discovered brown dwarfs in very close orbits with white dwarfs that have somehow survived being engulfed by their  companion when it was a red giant. One hemisphere is continually being heated while the other permanently stares into space, just like a hot Jupiter. We can use these bright systems to learn about the physics of heated Jovian atmospheres.  

We would like an enthusiastic PhD student to join our team to continue this work through further ground- and space-based programmes with 8m telescopes such as the VLT, Gemini, and the Spitzer space telescope.  

You will learn how to take, reduce and analyse infra-red and optical imaging and spectroscopic data, and you will also exploit the large infrared UKIDSS and VISTA surveys to search for more white dwarf + brown dwarf/planet systems. 
And you will help our team to undertake new programmes: firstly, studying variable white dwarfs to detect planets through timing anomalies, just as planets have been found around radio pulsars through timing studies.
Data for this will be collected from small ground-based telescopes, including a 1m robotic telescope we have built on La Palma. You will also be able to exploit data from the Next-Generation Survey Telescope to search for rocky planets as small as the Moon eclipsing and transiting white dwarfs.   

Background Reading

Burleigh et al. 2002, MNRAS, 331, L41
Hogan et al. 2009, MNRAS, 396, 2074
Maxted et al. 2006, Nature, 442, 543
Steele et al. 2011, MNRAS, 416, 2768
Faedi et al. 2011, MNRAS, 410, 899