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Published March 10, 2014 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

The AllWISE Motion Survey and the Quest for Cold Subdwarfs

Abstract

The AllWISE processing pipeline has measured motions for all objects detected on Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) images taken between 2010 January and 2011 February. In this paper, we discuss new capabilities made to the software pipeline in order to make motion measurements possible, and we characterize the resulting data products for use by future researchers. Using a stringent set of selection criteria, we find 22,445 objects that have significant AllWISE motions, of which 3525 have motions that can be independently confirmed from earlier Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) images, yet lack any published motions in SIMBAD. Another 58 sources lack 2MASS counterparts and are presented as motion candidates only. Limited spectroscopic follow-up of this list has already revealed eight new L subdwarfs. These may provide the first hints of a "subdwarf gap" at mid-L types that would indicate the break between the stellar and substellar populations at low metallicities (i.e., old ages). Another object in the motion list--WISEA J154045.67-510139.3--is a bright (J ≈ 9 mag) object of type M6; both the spectrophotometric distance and a crude preliminary parallax place it ~6 pc from the Sun. We also compare our list of motion objects to the recently published list of 762 WISE motion objects from Luhman. While these first large motion studies with WISE data have been very successful in revealing previously overlooked nearby dwarfs, both studies missed objects that the other found, demonstrating that many other nearby objects likely await discovery in the AllWISE data products.

Additional Information

© 2014 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2014 January 10; accepted 2014 February 3; published 2014 February 24. This publication makes use of data products from WISE, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology (Caltech), funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This research has made use of the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive, which is operated by JPL/Caltech, under contract with NASA. We are indebted to the SIMBAD database and the VizieR catalog access tool, provided by CDS, Strasbourg, France, and we acknowledge use of the Database of Ultracool Parallaxes maintained by Trent Dupuy. We thank our referee, whose critique of the original draft resulted in a clearer, more complete paper. We thank Fiona Harrison, George Djorgovski, Brian Mazur, and Barry Madore for PI-ing telescope time used for spectroscopic follow-up and are grateful for the time allotted by Caltech, NASA/IRTF, and the Carnegie Observatories. We also thank Nicolas Lodieu, John Gizis, and Sebastien Lépine for providing published spectra of subdwarfs. Facilities: WISE,Hale(Double Spectrograph),Keck:I(LRIS), Keck:II(DEIMOS, NIRSPEC), IRTF(SpeX), Magellan:Baade (IMACS).

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Published - 0004-637X_783_2_122.pdf

Submitted - 1402.0661v1.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
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October 26, 2023