Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert

Details Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.3003k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #30.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.781

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Scientific paper

I will present the results of a survey for stellar and substellar companions to 82 young stars in the nearby OB association Upper Scorpius. This survey used nonredundant aperture-mask interferometry to achieve typical contrast limits of DeltaK=5-6 at the diffraction limit, revealing 12 new binary companions that lay below the detection limits of traditional high-resolution imaging; complementary snapshot imaging discovered 7 additional directly resolved companions. The overall frequency of binary companions (33+5-4% at separations of 6-435 AU) appears to be equivalent to field stars of similar mass, but the companion mass function appears to be more biased toward equal-mass companions than the equivalent mass function in the field. This result could indicate an environmental or dynamical effect, but our number statistics are not yet sufficient to place strong constraints on its nature. The survey limits encompass the entire substellar mass range, but it only detected a single companion that might be a brown dwarf; this deficit resembles the so-called "brown dwarf desert" that has been observed by radial-velocity planet searches. Finally, the survey's deep detection limits extend into the top of the planetary mass function; it has not identified any planetary companions at high confidence (>99.5%), but it did identify four candidate companions at lower confidence (>97.5%) that merit additional followup to confirm or disprove their existence. I will summarize the corresponding constraints on the frequency, mass function, and separation distribution for extrasolar giant planets.

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