How Dry is the Brown Dwarf Desert? Quantifying the Relative Number of Planets, Brown Dwarfs, and Stellar Companions around Nearby Sun-like Stars

By D. Grether, Charles H. Lineweaver. 2004

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Sun-like stars have stellar, brown dwarf, and planetary companions. To help constrain their formation and migration scenarios, we analyze the close companions (orbital period <5 yr) of nearby Sun-like stars. By using the same sample to extract the relative numbers of stellar, brown dwarf, and planetary companions, we verify the existence of a very dry brown dwarf desert and describe it quantitatively. With decreasing mass, the companion mass function drops by almost 2 orders of magnitude from 1 M☉ stellar companions to the brown dwarf desert and then rises by more than an order of magnitude from brown dwarfs to Jupiter-mass planets. The slopes of the planetary and stellar companion mass functions are of opposite sign and are incompatible at the 3 σ level, thus yielding a brown dwarf desert. The minimum number of companions per unit interval in log mass (the driest part of the desert) is at M = 31MJ. Approximately 16% of Sun-like stars have close (P < 5 yr) companions more massive than Jupiter: 11% ± 3% are stellar, <1% are brown dwarf, and 5% ± 2% are giant planets. The steep decline in the number of companions in the brown dwarf regime, compared to the initial mass function of individual stars and free-floating brown dwarfs, suggests either a different spectrum of gravitational fragmentation in the formation environment or post-formation migratory processes disinclined to leave brown dwarfs in close orbits.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bdd2a17ba4896547dcbbb89047a35fab8c4e2ba5

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Citations in the corpus

Structure and Evolution of Nearby Stars with Planets. II. Physical Properties of ~1000 Cool Stars from the SPOCS Catalog (2006, background): “Spectroscopic observations show that there is a distinct absence of secondaries with masses M2 ≈ 0.01 − 0.08M⊙ around solar-type primaries, so-called “brown dwarf desert” (Halbwachs et al. 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
Stellar, brown dwarf and multiple star properties from hydrodynamical simulations of star cluster formation (2008, background): “There has been much discussion over the past decade of the observed “brown dwarf desert” for close brown dwarf companions solar-type stars (frequency≈ 1%; Marcy & Butler 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006) and how this changes for wider separations and different primary masses.”
Dearth of short-period Neptunian exoplanets - a desert in period-mass and period-radius planes (2016, background): “In this sense, the Neptunian desert might be similar to the shortperiod brown-dwarf desert (e.g., Grether & Lineweaver 2006; Cheetham et al. 2015; Bouchy et al. 2015), in the range of ∼ 20–80MJup, which distinguishes between planets and stellar companions (e.g., Armitage & Bonnell 2002; Ma & Ge…”
Dawes Review 6: The Impact of Companions on Stellar Evolution (2016, background): “There is a remarkable lack of substellar companions around Solar-type stars (the brown dwarf desert; Marcy, Cochran, & Mayor 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
TWO WIDE PLANETARY-MASS COMPANIONS TO SOLAR-TYPE STARS IN UPPER SCORPIUS (2010, background): “…in the same range as radial velocity or transiting planets with <5AU separations, which have a continuous mass distribution up to ∼20MJ, then a gap in mass until arguably star-like objects are found at >60MJ (Grether & Lineweaver 2006; Deleuil et al. 2008; Bouchy et al. 2010; Anderson et al. 2010).”
Transiting exoplanets from the CoRoT space mission . VI. CoRoT-Exo-3b: the first secure inhabitant of the brown-dwarf desert (2008, background): “The discovery of a 21 MJup object in a short period orbit is unexpected given the paucity of objects in the so-called “brown-dwarf desert” (e.g. Halbwachs et al. 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
Spectroastrometric Imaging of Molecular Gas within Protoplanetary Disk Gaps (2008, background): “The inner disk inclination, if more representative of the companion orbit inclination than the outer disk inclination of 7 ± 1◦ by Qi et al. (2004), places this short period companion in the “brown dwarf desert” (Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
THE sdB+M ECLIPSING SYSTEM HW VIRGINIS AND ITS CIRCUMBINARY PLANETS (2008, result): “However, observational results (Grether & Lineweaver 2006; Udry & Santos 2007) indicate that the BD and planet populations overlap in the 10–20 MJup interval so it is not possible to differentiate between low-mass BDs and highmass giant planets from measured masses alone.”
THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH DATA RELEASES OF THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY: FINAL DATA FROM SDSS-III (2015, background): “It aimed to determine the distribution of gas giant planets (M > 0.5 MJupiter) in orbits of periods 2 years and explore the “brown dwarf desert” over the mass range 13 M 80 MJupiter (Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
Search for brown-dwarf companions of stars (2010, background): “The mass distribution of close companions to Sun-like stars exhibits a clear deficit of brown dwarfs compared to planets and stellar binaries (Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
MAPPING THE SHORES OF THE BROWN DWARF DESERT. II. MULTIPLE STAR FORMATION IN TAURUS–AURIGA (2011, background): “Over the past fifteen years, radial velocity surveys have discovered many short-period stellar companions and exoplanets, but relatively few companions with masses of ∼10–80MJup (e.g., Marcy & Butler 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006), a gap known as the “brown dwarf desert”.”
Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert. I. Upper Scorpius (2007, background): “However, they have revealed a surprising lack of brown dwarf mass companions in close orbits, with estimates suggesting frequencies of < 1% (Marcy & Butler 2000; Grether & Lineweaver 2006).”
Stellar Multiplicity (2013, background): “The extremely low frequency of BD companions among solar-type SBs (Grether & Lineweaver 2006; Marcy, Cochran & Mayor 2000) is inconsistent with extrapolations of both the binary mass function and the planetary mass function (e.g., Howard et al. 2010, Reffert & Quirrenbach 2011, Sahlmann et al.…”