A new brown dwarf desert? A scarcity of wide ultracool binaries

Allen, Peter R. and Koerner, David W. and McElwain, Michael W. and Cruz, Kelle L. and Reid, I. Neill (2007) A new brown dwarf desert? A scarcity of wide ultracool binaries. Astronomical Journal, 133 (3). pp. 971-978. ISSN 1538-3881

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Abstract

We present the results of a deep-imaging search for wide companions to low-mass stars and brown dwarfs using NSFCam on the Infrared Telescope Facility. We searched a sample of 132 M7-L8 dwarfs to magnitude limits of J similar to 20.5 and K similar to 18.5, corresponding to secondary-to-primary mass ratios of similar to 0.5. No companions were found with separations between 2" and 31" (similar to 40 to similar to 1000 AU). This null result implies a wide companion frequency below 2.3% at the 95% confidence level within the sensitivity limits of the survey. Preliminary modeling efforts indicate that we could have detected 85% of companions more massive than 0.05 M-circle dot and 50% above 0.03 M-circle dot.

Item Type:	Article
ID number or DOI:	10.1086/510346
Keywords:	2mass; binaries : general; camera; digital sky survey; field; neighbors; Stars; stars : low-mass, brown dwarfs; substellar mass function; systems; t-dwarfs; telescope
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Faculty/Staff
Department/Unit:	College of Engineering, Forestry, and Natural Science > Physics and Astronomy
Date Deposited:	29 Sep 2015 21:59
URI:	http://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/77

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