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Since white dwarfs are small, the contrast between the thermal emission of anorbiting object and a white dwarf is dramatically enhanced compared to a mainsequence host. Furthermore, rocky objects much smaller than the moon have noatmospheres and are tidally locked to the white dwarf. We show that this leadsto temperature contrasts between their day and night side of order unity thatshould lead to temporal variations in infrared flux over an orbital period of$\sim 0.2$ to $\sim 2$ days. Ground based telescopes could detect objects witha mass as small as $1\%$ of the lunar mass $M_L$ around Sirius B with a fewhours of exposure. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may be able to detectobjects as small as $10^{-3} M_L$ around most nearby white dwarfs. The tightestconstraints will typically be placed on 12,000 K white dwarfs, whose Roche zonecoincides with the dust sublimation zone. Constraining the abundance of minorplanets around white dwarfs as a function of their surface temperatures (andtherefore age) provides a novel probe for the physics of planetary formation.

Finding rocky asteroids around white dwarfs by their periodic thermal emission