Very low mass stellar and substellar companions to solar-like stars from marvels. v. a low eccentricity brown dwarf from the driest part of the DESERT, MARVELS-6b

Nathan De Lee, Jian Ge, Justin R. Crepp, Jason Eastman, Massimiliano Esposito, Bruno Femenía, Scott W. Fleming, B. Scott Gaudi, Luan Ghezzi, Jonay I. González Hernández, Brian L. Lee, Keivan G. Stassun, John P. Wisniewski, W. Michael Wood-Vasey, Eric Agol, Carlos Allende Prieto, Rory Barnes, Dmitry Bizyaev, Phillip Cargile, Liang ChangLuiz N. Da Costa, G. F.Porto De Mello, Leticia D. Ferreira, Bruce Gary, Leslie Hebb, Jon Holtzman, Jian Liu, Bo Ma, Claude E. Mack, Suvrath Mahadevan, Marcio A.G. Maia, Duy Cuong Nguyen, Audrey Oravetz, Daniel J. Oravetz, Martin Paegert, Kaike Pan, Joshua Pepper, Elena Malanushenko, Viktor Malanushenko, Rafael Rebolo, Basilio X. Santiago, Donald P. Schneider, Alaina C. Shelden Bradley, Xiaoke Wan, Ji Wang, Bo Zhao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Scopus citations

Abstract

We describe the discovery of a likely brown dwarf (BD) companion with a minimum mass of 31.7 ± 2.0 MJup to GSC 03546-01452 from the MARVELS radial velocity survey, which we designate as MARVELS-6b. For reasonable priors, our analysis gives a probability of 72% that MARVELS-6b has a mass below the hydrogen-burning limit of 0.072 Mȯ, and thus it is a high-confidence BD companion. It has a moderately long orbital period of 47.8929 +0.0063-0.0062 days with a low eccentricity of 0.1442+0.0078 -0.0073, and a semi-amplitude of 1644 +12-13 m s-1. Moderate resolution spectroscopy of the host star has determined the following parameters: Teff = 5598 ± 63, log g = 4.44 ± 0.17, and [Fe/H] = +0.40 ± 0.09. Based upon these measurements, GSC 03546-01452 has a probable mass and radius of M* = 1.11 ± 0.11 Mȯ and R* = 1.06 ± 0.23 RȮ with an age consistent with less than ∼6 Gyr at a distance of 219 ± 21 pc from the Sun. Although MARVELS-6b is not observed to transit, we cannot definitively rule out a transiting configuration based on our observations. There is a visual companion detected with Lucky Imaging at 7.″7 from the host star, but our analysis shows that it is not bound to this system. The minimum mass of MARVELS-6b exists at the minimum of the mass functions for both stars and planets, making this a rare object even compared to other BDs. It also exists in an underdense region in both period/eccentricity and metallicity/eccentricity space.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number155
JournalAstronomical Journal
Volume145
Issue number6
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2013

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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