The frequency and infrared brightness of circumstellar discs at white dwarfs

White dwarfs whose atmospheres are polluted by terrestrial-like planetary debris have become a powerful and unique tool to study evolved planetary systems. This paper presents results for an unbiased Spitzer IRAC search for circumstellar dust orbiting a homogeneous and well-defined sample of 134 single white dwarfs. The stars were selected without regard to atmospheric metal content but were chosen to have 1) hydrogen rich atmospheres, 2) 17 000 K Teff 25 000 K and correspondingly young post main-sequence ages of 15–270 Myr, and 3) sufficient far-ultraviolet brightness for a corresponding Hubble Space Telescope COS Snapshot. Five white dwarfs were found to host an infrared bright dust disc, three previously known, and two reported here for the first time, yielding a nominal 3.7 % of white dwarfs in this post-main sequence age range with detectable circumstellar dust. Remarkably, complementary HST observations indicate that a fraction of 27 % show metals in their photosphere that can only be explained with ongoing accretion from circumstellar material, indicating that nearly 90 % of discs escape detection in the infrared, likely due to small emitting surface area. This paper also presents the distribution of disc fractional luminosity as a function of cooling age for all known dusty white dwarfs, suggesting possible disc evolution scenarios and indicating an undetected population of circumstellar discs.