An Improbable Solution to the Underluminosity of 2M1207B: A Hot Protoplanet Collision Afterglow

Details An Improbable Solution to the Underluminosity of 2M1207B: A Hot Protoplanet Collision Afterglow An Improbable Solution to the Underluminosity of 2M1207B: A Hot Protoplanet Collision Afterglow

Dec 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.6803m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #68.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.858

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Scientific paper

We introduce an alternative hypothesis to explain the very low luminosity of the cool (L-type) companion to the 25 Jupiter mass 8 Myr-old brown dwarf 2M1207A. Recently, Mohanty et al. (2007) found that effective temperature estimates for 2M1207B (1600 +- 100 K) are grossly inconsistent with its lying on the same isochrone as the primary, being a factor of 10 underluminous at all bands between I (0.8 micron) and L' (3.6 micron). Mohanty et al. explain this discrepency by suggesting that 2M1207B is an 8 Jupiter mass object surrounded by an edge-on disk comprised of large dust grains producing 2.5 mag of achromatic extinction. We offer an alternative explanation: the apparent flux reflects the actual source luminosity. Given the temperature, we infer a small radius ( 49,000 km), and for a range of plausible densities, we estimate a mass < Jupiter mass. We propose that 2M1207B could be a hot protoplanet collision afterglow and show that the radiative timescale for such an object is > 1% the age of the system. If our hypothesis is correct, the surface gravity of 2M1207B should be an order of magnitude lower than predicted by Mohanty et al. (2007). EM acknowledges support from a Clay Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

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