Discovery of Two T Dwarf Companions with the Spitzer Space Telescope

By K. Luhman, B. Patten, M. Marengo, M. Schuster, J. Hora, Richard S. Ellis, J. Stauffer, S. Sonnett, E. Winston, R. Gutermuth and 5 more. 2006

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the discovery of T dwarf companions to the nearby stars HN Peg (G0 V, 18.4 pc, τ ~ 0.3 Gyr) and HD 3651 (K0 V, 11.1 pc, τ ~ 7 Gyr). During an ongoing survey of 5′ × 5′ fields surrounding stars in the solar neighborhood with the Infrared Array Camera aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope, we identified these companions as candidate T dwarfs based on their mid-infrared colors. Using near-infrared spectra obtained with SpeX at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, we confirm the presence of methane absorption that characterizes T dwarfs and measure spectral types of T2.5 ± 0.5 and T7.5 ± 0.5 for HN Peg B and HD 3651B, respectively. By comparing our Spitzer data to images from the Two Micron All Sky Survey obtained several years earlier, we find that the proper motions of HN Peg B and HD 3651B are consistent with those of the primaries, confirming their companionship. A comparison of their luminosities to the values predicted by theoretical evolutionary models implies masses of 0.021 ± 0.009 and 0.051 ± 0.014 M☉ for HN Peg B and HD 3651B, respectively. In addition, the models imply an effective temperature for HN Peg B that is significantly lower than the values derived for other T dwarfs at similar spectral types, which is the same behavior reported by Metchev & Hillenbrand for the young late L dwarf HD 203030B. Thus, the temperature of the L/T transition appears to depend on surface gravity. Meanwhile, HD 3651B is the first substellar companion directly imaged around a star that is known to harbor a close-in planet from radial velocity surveys. The discovery of this companion supports the notion that the high eccentricities of close-in planets like that near HD 3651 may be the result of perturbations by low-mass companions at wide separations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/95af0cc4962fe2d5ffc356609d309b9b75a9c3e8

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Michael C. Liu
2. M. Marley
3. T. Dupuy
4. A. Burgasser
5. Jon Fortney
6. J. D. Kirkpatrick
7. K. Luhman
8. B. Bowler

Citations in the corpus

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• Synthetic Spectra and Colors of Young Giant Planet Atmospheres: Effects of Initial Conditions and Atmospheric Metallicity (2008, background): “While brown dwarfs likely form directly from molecular cloud gas in something akin to the star formation mechanism (Luhman et al. 2007a; Whitworth et al. 2007), “true planets” form in a disk (IAU definitions aside—for a discussion see Chabrier et al. 2007), perhaps predominantly via core accretion…”
• The Evolution of L and T Dwarfs in Color-Magnitude Diagrams (2008, background): “It is supported by the lowTeA found for two transition brown dwarf companions of young main-sequence stars, HD 203030B (Metchev & Hillenbrand 2006) and HN Peg B (Luhman et al. 2007).”
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