Planets surviving common envelope evolution should be rare, massive, and orbit very close to their host star
Abstract
The discovery of exoplanets around white dwarfs uniquely informs our understanding of planetary survival through stellar evolution. Common Envelope (CE) evolution is one of the proposed mechanisms that could shape the orbital architecture of these planets around stellar remnants. In this work, we predict the occurrence rate and orbital separation/planet mass distributions for planets that could form around white dwarfs through CE evolution. We simulate populations of giant-planet systems, sampling initial conditions from observed mass and semi-major axis distributions for main sequence stars. We evolve the host star from main sequence to white dwarf to assess which planetary configurations could survive, and we predict the resulting post-CE planet population. Our results suggest that such planets should be rare, massive, and have very close orbital separations. We find that most of the surviving planets have masses of >10 MJup and orbital separations <1.4 times the tidal disruption radius, adisrupt (≲0.006 AU, also called the Roche limit), which is in contrast to high eccentricity migration, which produces planets with orbital separations >2adisrupt. The properties of CE survivors from our simulations contrast with the known closely-orbiting planet WD 1856+534 b, suggesting a different mechanism may be responsible for its formation.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{gaibor2026planets,
title = {{Planets surviving common envelope evolution should be rare, massive, and orbit very close to their host star}},
author = {Yadira S. Gaibor and Andrew Vanderburg and Juliette C. Becker and Melinda Soares-Furtado and Saul Rappaport and Tansu Daylan},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.27055},
eprint = {2610.27055},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27055},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Planets surviving common envelope evolution should be rare, massive, and orbit very close to their host star
AU - Yadira S. Gaibor
AU - Andrew Vanderburg
AU - Juliette C. Becker
AU - Melinda Soares-Furtado
AU - Saul Rappaport
AU - Tansu Daylan
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.27055
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27055
AB - The discovery of exoplanets around white dwarfs uniquely informs our understanding of planetary survival through stellar evolution. Common Envelope (CE) evolution is one of the proposed mechanisms that could shape the orbital architecture of these planets around stellar remnants. In this work, we predict the occurrence rate and orbital separation/planet mass distributions for planets that could form around white dwarfs through CE evolution. We simulate populations of giant-planet systems, sampling initial conditions from observed mass and semi-major axis distributions for main sequence stars. We evolve the host star from main sequence to white dwarf to assess which planetary configurations could survive, and we predict the resulting post-CE planet population. Our results suggest that such planets should be rare, massive, and have very close orbital separations. We find that most of the surviving planets have masses of >10 M_Jup and orbital separations <1.4 times the tidal disruption radius, a_disrupt (≲0.006 AU, also called the Roche limit), which is in contrast to high eccentricity migration, which produces planets with orbital separations >2a_disrupt. The properties of CE survivors from our simulations contrast with the known closely-orbiting planet WD 1856+534 b, suggesting a different mechanism may be responsible for its formation.
ER -