JWST Directly Images Giant Planet Candidates Around Two Metal-polluted White Dwarf Stars
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We report the discovery of two directly imaged, giant planet candidates orbiting the metal-rich, hydrogen atmosphere white dwarfs WD 1202−232 and WD 2105−82. JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) data on these two stars show a nearby resolved source at a projected separation of 11.47 and 34.62 au, respectively. Assuming the planets formed at the same time as their host stars, with total ages of 5.3 and 1.6 Gyr, the MIRI photometry is consistent with giant planets with masses ≈1–7 M Jup . The probability of both candidates being false positives due to red background sources is approximately 1 in 3000. If confirmed, these would be the first directly imaged planets that are similar in both age and separation to the giant planets in our own solar system, and they would demonstrate that widely separated giant planets like Jupiter survive stellar evolution. Giant planet perturbers are widely used to explain the tidal disruption of asteroids around metal-polluted white dwarfs. Confirmation of these two planet candidates with future MIRI imaging would provide evidence that directly links giant planets to metal pollution in white dwarf stars.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".