SIMBAD references

For a fraction of single white dwarfs with debris disks, an additional gaseous disk was discovered. Both dust and gas are thought to be created by the disruption of planetary bodies. The composition of the extrasolar planetary material can directly be analyzed in the gaseous disk component, and the disk dynamics might be accessible by investigating the temporal behavior of the CaII infrared emission triplet, hallmark of the gas disk. We obtained new optical spectra for the first helium-dominated white dwarf for which a gas disk was discovered (Ton 345) and modeled the non-LTE spectra of viscous gas disks composed of carbon, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, sulfur, and calcium with chemical abundances typical for solar system asteroids. Iron and its possible line-blanketing effects on the model structure and spectral energy distribution was still neglected. A set of models with different radii, effective temperatures, and surface densities as well as chondritic and bulk-Earth abundances was computed and compared with the observed line profiles of the CaII infrared triplet. Our models suggest that the CaII emission stems from a rather narrow gas ring with a radial extent of R=0.44-0.94R_☉, a uniform surface density Sigma =0.3g/cm2, and an effective temperature of T_eff≃6000K. The often assumed chemical mixtures derived from photospheric abundances in polluted white dwarfs - similar to a chondritic or bulk-Earth composition - produce unobserved emission lines in the model and therefore have to be altered. We do not detect any line-profile variability on timescales of hours, but we confirm the long-term trend over the past decade for the red-blue asymmetry of the double-peaked lines.