CaltechAUTHORS
Published October 1, 2015 | Version Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Discovery of a Low-mass Companion Around HR 3549

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 3. ROR icon University of Exeter
  • 4. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center

Abstract

We report the discovery of a low-mass companion to HR 3549, an A0V star surrounded by a debris disk with a warm excess detected by WISE at 22 μm (10σ significance). We imaged HR 3549 B in the L band with NAOS-CONICA, the adaptive optics infrared camera of the Very Large Telescope, in January 2013 and confirmed its common proper motion in 2015 January. The companion is at a projected separation of ≃80 AU and position angle of ≃157°, so it is orbiting well beyond the warm disk inner edge of r > 10 AU. Our age estimate for this system corresponds to a companion mass in the range 15–80 M_J, spanning the brown dwarf regime, and so HR 3549 B is another recent addition to the growing list of brown dwarf desert objects with extreme mass ratios. The simultaneous presence of a warm disk and a brown dwarf around HR 3549 provides interesting empirical constraints on models of the formation of substellar companions.

Additional Information

© 2015 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2015 July 1; accepted 2015 August 21; published 2015 September 28. The first author is grateful to Prof. Lynne Hillenbrand (Caltech) and Ben Zuckerman (UCLA) for their advice and comments. T.J.D is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant No. DGE1144469. M.B. is supported by a NASA Space Technology Research fellowship, grant No. NNX13AN42H. This publication makes use of data products from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Facility: Very Large Telescope.

Attached Files

Published - Mawet_2015p103.pdf

Submitted - 1509.05689.pdf

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1509.05689.pdf

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Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
62241
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20151119-125957783

Related works

Describes
http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.05689 (URL)

Funding

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
DGE-1144469
NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship
NNX13AN42H
NASA/JPL/Caltech

Dates

Created
2015-11-19
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2021-11-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field