How dust particles orbiting white dwarfs can reveal undetected co-orbiting exoplanets I. Exoplanet on a circular orbit

@misc{antoniadou2026dust,
  title = {{How dust particles orbiting white dwarfs can reveal undetected co-orbiting exoplanets I. Exoplanet on a circular orbit}},
  author = {Kyriaki I. Antoniadou and Dimitri Veras},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.24405},
  eprint = {2609.24405},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24405},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - How dust particles orbiting white dwarfs can reveal undetected co-orbiting exoplanets I. Exoplanet on a circular orbit
AU  - Kyriaki I. Antoniadou
AU  - Dimitri Veras
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/03
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.24405
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24405
AB  - Abridged. Mounting observations of transiting dusty debris orbiting WDs display complex signatures that often feature orbital period drifts. The asteroid or planet progenitor of this debris might still be partly intact on a near-circular orbit that is inclined or coplanar, with a period that is similar to that of the dust. Alternatively, the debris could persist concurrently with other intact asteroids or planets that had tidally circularised around the WD at a later time, but still remain directly unobservable. We sought to first improve the identification of this detectability threshold by expanding our previous investigation of the WD-secondary-dust co-orbital circular restricted three-body problem (CRTBP) to higher secondary masses corresponding to Ceres, Mercury, Earth, and Neptune. Next, we continued to explore the link between the analytic and numerical characterisations of the CRTBP. First, we computed families of periodic orbits in the 1/1 mean-motion-resonance (MMR) in both the planar and spatial CRTBP cases, where the dust is on an arbitrarily eccentric orbit. Second, we generated global phase space portraits. Third, we determined observational links with debris located in very close proximity to WDs via N-body simulations. For each method we applied, we report a novel set of results. These include 3 newly discovered bifurcation points, B_T^4, B_cs^4, and B_cs^5, 2 branches of asymmetric periodic orbits, called A_2 and A_3, at high dust eccentricity regime in the 2D-CRTBP, and 2 families of symmetric orbits in the 3D-CRTBP. The maps reveal stability domains as a function of the dust's eccentricity, argument of pericentre, and slight semi-major axis deviations from the 1/1 MMR. The N-body simulations reveal that over 10 yr, mass analogues of Mercury, Earth, and Neptune generate orbital period deviations in the dust of, respectively, 1-10 s, 10-100 s, and over 100 s.
ER  -