White dwarf magnetospheres: Shielding volatile content of icy objects and implications for volatile pollution scarcity

¹ Université Côte d’Azur, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Laboratoire Lagrange, Nice, France
e-mail: wenhan.zhou@oca.eu
² School of Physics and Astronomy, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, PR China
e-mail: liushangfei@mail.sysu.edu.cn
³ CSST Science Center for the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, Guangdong Province, PR China
⁴ Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
⁵ Institute for Advanced Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, PR China

Received: 18 January 2024
Accepted: 8 April 2024

Abstract

Context. About 25–50% of white dwarfs are found to be contaminated by heavy elements, which are believed to originate from external sources such as planetary materials. Elemental abundances suggest that most of the pollutants are rocky objects and only a small fraction of white dwarfs bear traces of volatile accretion.

Aims. In order to account for the scarcity of volatile pollution, we investigate the role of the white dwarfs’ magnetospheres in shielding the volatile content of icy objects.

Methods. We estimated the volatile sublimation of inward drifting exocomets. We assume the orbits of the exocomets are circularized by the Alfvén wing drag that is effective for long-period comets.

Results. Volatile material can sublimate outside the corotation radius and be shielded by the magnetic field. The two conditions for this volatile-shielded mechanism are that the magnetosphere radius must be larger than the corotation radius and that the volatiles are depleted outside the corotation radius, which requires a sufficiently slow orbital circularization process. We applied our model to nine white dwarfs with known rotational periods, magnetic fields, and atmosphere compositions. Our volatile-shielded model may explain the excess of volatile elements such as C and S in the disk relative to the white dwarf atmosphere in WD2326+049 (G29-38). Nevertheless, given the sensitivity of our model to the circularization process and material properties of icy objects, there remains considerable uncertainty in our results.

Conclusions. We emphasize the importance of white dwarfs’ magnetic fields in preventing the accretion of volatile gas onto them. Our work suggests a possible explanation for the scarcity of volatile-accretion signatures among white dwarfs. We also identify a correlation between the magnetic field strength, the spin period, and the composition of pollutants in white dwarf atmospheres. However, given the uncertainties in our model, more observations are necessary to establish more precise constraints on the relevant parameters.