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Published December 1, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

New M, L, and T Dwarf Companions to Nearby Stars from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

Abstract

We present 11 candidate late-type companions to nearby stars identified with data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). Eight of the candidates are likely to be companions based on their common proper motions with the primaries. The remaining three objects are rejected as companions, one of which is a free-floating T7 dwarf. Spectral types are available for five of the companions, which consist of M2V, M8.5V, L5, T8, and T8. Based on their photometry, the unclassified companions are probably two mid-M dwarfs and one late-M/early-L dwarf. One of the T8 companions, WISE J142320.84+011638.0, has already been reported by Pinfield and coworkers. The other T8 companion, ULAS J095047.28+011734.3, was discovered by Burningham and coworkers through the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Infrared Deep Sky Survey, but its companionship has not been previously recognized in the literature. The L5 companion, 2MASS J17430860+8526594, is a new member of a class of L dwarfs that exhibit unusually blue near-IR colors. Among the possible mechanisms that have been previously proposed for the peculiar colors of these L dwarfs, low metallicity does not appear to be a viable explanation for 2MASS J17430860+8526594 since our spectrum of the primary suggests that its metallicity is not significantly subsolar.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2012 August 24; accepted 2012 October 15; published 2012 November 16. K.L. acknowledges support from grant AST-0544588 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and grant NNX12AI47G from the NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program. WISE is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)/California Institute of Technology (Caltech), funded by NASA. 2MASS is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) at Caltech, funded by NASA and the NSF. The W. M. Keck Observatory is operated as a scientific partnership among Caltech, the University of California, and NASA and was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The IRTF is operated by the University of Hawaii under cooperative agreement NNX-08AE38A with NASA. The HET is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly. The Spitzer Space Telescope is operated by JPL and Caltech under contract with NASA. Kitt Peak National Observatory is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under cooperative agreement with the NSF. WIYN Observatory is a joint facility of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University, Yale University, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. WIRCam is a joint project of CFHT, Taiwan, Korea, Canada, and France. CFHT is operated by the National Research Council of Canada, the Institute National des Sciences de l'Univers of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique of France, and the University of Hawaii. This work uses data from the SpeX Prism Spectral Libraries (maintained by Adam Burgasser at http://www.browndwarfs.org/spexprism), the M, L, and T dwarf compendium at http://DwarfArchives.org (maintained by Chris Gelino, Davy Kirkpatrick, and Adam Burgasser), the Brown Dwarf Spectroscopic Survey Archive (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/∼mclean/BDSSarchive), the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (operated by JPL under contract with NASA), and the ESO/ST-ECF Science Archive Facility. The Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds is supported by the Pennsylvania State University, the Eberly College of Science, and the Pennsylvania Space Grant Consortium. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

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August 22, 2023
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