Papers › On the detectability of transiting planets orbiting white dwarfs using LSST
On the detectability of transiting planets orbiting white dwarfs using LSST
Jorge Cortes, David M. Kipping
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
White dwarfs are one of the few types of stellar objects for which we know almost nothing about the possible existence of companion planets. Recent evidence for metal contaminated atmospheres, circumstellar debris disks and transiting planetary debris all indicate that planets may be likely. However, white dwarf transit surveys are challenging due to the intrinsic faintness of such objects, the short timescale of the transits and the low transit probabilities due to their compact radii. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) offers a remedy to these problems as a deep, half-sky survey with fast exposures encompassing approximately 10 million white dwarfs with r<24.5 apparent magnitude. We simulate LSST photometric observations of 3.5 million white dwarfs over a ten-year period and calculate the detectability of companion planets with P<10 d via transits. We find typical detection rates in the range of 5 ×10⁻⁶ to 4 ×10⁻⁴ for Ceres-sized bodies to Earth-sized worlds, yielding ∼50 to 4 000 detections for a 100% occurrence rate of each. For terrestrial planets in the continuously habitable zone, we find detection rates of ∼10⁻³ indicating that LSST would reveal hundreds of such worlds for occurrence rates in the range of 1% to 10%.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections