White dwarf planets and biomarkers

Detecting bio-markers in habitable-zone earths transiting white dwarfs
http://arxiv.org/abs/1301.4994

Suggests that JWST might be able to detect various chemicals in the atmosphere of an Earth-like planet transiting a white dwarf star.

If they exist.

IF.

Now with a press release and pretty pictures!

SpaceRef

A couple of recent papers on the arXiv about prospects for detecting transiting planets around white dwarfs:

Lund et al. "Transiting Planets with LSST IV: Detecting Planets around White Dwarfs"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.10900

Cortés & Kipping "On the detectability of transiting planets orbiting white dwarfs using LSST"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.00776

Hopefully these kind of planets do exist, it would open up a whole bunch of interesting possibilities.

Another attempt to look for white dwarf planets, unfortunately no transits.

Dame et al. "The DECam Minute Cadence Survey II: 49 Variables but No Planetary Transits of a White Dwarf"
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04075

Quote :

We use these data to search for eclipse-like events consistent with a planetary transit of a white dwarf and other sources of stellar variability within the field. We do not find any significant evidence for minute-long transits around our targets, hence we rule out planetary transits around ~370 white dwarfs that should be present in this field.