THE GEMINI/NICI PLANET-FINDING CAMPAIGN: THE FREQUENCY OF PLANETS AROUND YOUNG MOVING GROUP STARS

By B. Biller, Michael C. Liu, Z. Wahhaj, E. Nielsen, Thomas L. Hayward, J. Males, A. Skemer, L. Close, M. Chun, C. Ftaclas and 11 more. 2013

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report results of a direct imaging survey for giant planets around 80 members of the β Pic, TW Hya, Tucana-Horologium, AB Dor, and Hercules-Lyra moving groups, observed as part of the Gemini/NICI Planet-Finding Campaign. For this sample, we obtained median contrasts of ΔH = 13.9 mag at 1″ in combined CH4 narrowband ADI+SDI mode and median contrasts of ΔH = 15.1 mag at 2″ in H-band ADI mode. We found numerous (>70) candidate companions in our survey images. Some of these candidates were rejected as common-proper motion companions using archival data; we reobserved with Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager (NICI) all other candidates that lay within 400 AU of the star and were not in dense stellar fields. The vast majority of candidate companions were confirmed as background objects from archival observations and/or dedicated NICI Campaign followup. Four co-moving companions of brown dwarf or stellar mass were discovered in this moving group sample: PZ Tel B (36 ± 6 MJup, 16.4 ± 1.0 AU), CD−35 2722B (31 ± 8 MJup, 67 ± 4 AU), HD 12894B (0.46 ± 0.08 M☉, 15.7 ± 1.0 AU), and BD+07 1919C (0.20 ± 0.03 M☉, 12.5 ± 1.4 AU). From a Bayesian analysis of the achieved H band ADI and ASDI contrasts, using power-law models of planet distributions and hot-start evolutionary models, we restrict the frequency of 1–20 MJup companions at semi-major axes from 10–150 AU to <18% at a 95.4% confidence level using DUSTY models and to <6% at a 95.4% using COND models. Our results strongly constrain the frequency of planets within semi-major axes of 50 AU as well. We restrict the frequency of 1–20 MJup companions at semi-major axes from 10–50 AU to <21% at a 95.4% confidence level using DUSTY models and to <7% at a 95.4% using COND models. This survey is the deepest search to date for giant planets around young moving group stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eb698140ca0cad3768d771cb046ea2117773a199

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. B. Bowler
2. Michael C. Liu
3. T. Dupuy
4. K. Allers
5. E. Shkolnik
6. D. Weinberg
7. C. Hirata
8. Motohide Tamura

Citations in the corpus

• The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems (2014, unknown): “(1) out to 10-100 AU (Lafrenière et al. 2007, Nielsen & Close 2010, Biller et al. 2013, Brandt et al. 2014).”
• Imaging Extrasolar Giant Planets (2016, methodology): “…less than 300 Myr and within 100 pc. Altogether this leaves 384 unique stars spanning B2–M6 spectral types: 76 from Bowler et al. (2015b), 72 from Biller et al. (2013), 61 from Nielsen et al. (2013), 54 from Lafrenière et al. (2007b), 45 from Brandt et al. (2014c), 30 from Janson et al.…”
• Wide-Field InfrarRed Survey Telescope-Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets WFIRST-AFTA 2015 Report (2015, methodology): “Taking the Gemini/NICI campaign as a representative example of a large completed survey, statisti- cal analysis shows that for a typical target star, the planet mass corresponding to 95% detection likelihood at 0.5 arcsec separation (~30 AU) was about 10 MJ (Biller et al. 2013).”
• THE HAWAII INFRARED PARALLAX PROGRAM. II. YOUNG ULTRACOOL FIELD DWARFS (2016, background): “— (1) This work; (2) 2MASS Point Source Catalog (Cutri et al. 2003); (3) UKIDSS DR10; (4) Allers et al. (2010); (5) Best et al. (2015); (6) Biller et al. (2013); (7) Bonnefoy et al. (2010); (8) Bonnefoy et al. (2011); (9) Bonnefoy et al. (2014a); (10) Bonnefoy et al. (2014b); (11) Bouvier et al.…”
• On the age of the β Pictoris moving group (2014, background): “Its close distance and young age also makes the BPMG an ideal candidate for discovering extrasolar planets via direct imaging (e.g. Biller et al. 2013; Males et al. 2014) as well as studying resolved debris disks with high angular resolution observations (e.g. Boccaletti et al. 2009; Churcher,…”
• PLANETS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS (PALMS). IV. THE OUTER ARCHITECTURE OF M DWARF PLANETARY SYSTEMS (2014, methodology): “…Gemini-North/NIRI, Chauvin et al. (2010) imaged 16 single M dwarfs with VLT/NaCo, Delorme et al. (2012) targeted 12 stars with VLT/NaCo in L′ band, and Biller et al. (2013) observed 35 single M dwarfs with Gemini-South/NICI.8 The aim of the Planets Around Low-Mass Stars (PALMS) survey is to find…”
• A PARAMETRIC MODELING APPROACH TO MEASURING THE GAS MASSES OF CIRCUMSTELLAR DISKS (2013, result): “This is consistent with the low numbers of Jovian planets seen around stars with masses ∼ 0.6−0.7M , either through radial velocity surveys or transits3, or direct imaging (Biller et al. 2013).”