A Candidate Substellar Companion to CoD -33 7795 (TWA 5)
Abstract
We present the discovery of a candidate substellar object in a survey of young stars in the solar vicinity using the sensitivity and spatial resolution afforded by the NICMOS coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope. The H=12.1 mag object was discovered approximately 2 arcsec from the TW Hydrae Association member CoD -33 7795 (TWA 5), and the photometry implies a spectral type M8-M8.5, with a temperature of approximately 2600K. We estimate that the probability of a chance alignment with a background objectof this nature is < 2 X 10^(-5), and therefore postulate the object (TWA 5B) is physically associated at a projected separation of 100 AU. Given the likely youth of the primary (~ 10 Myr), current brown dwarf cooling models predict a mass of approximately 20 Jupiter masses for TWA 5B.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9812187,
title = {A Candidate Substellar Companion to CoD -33 7795 (TWA 5)},
author = {P. J. Lowrance and C. McCarthy and E. E. Becklin and B. Zuckerman and G. Schneider and R. A. Webb and D. C. Hines and J. D. Kirkpatrick and D. W. Koerner and F. Low and R. Meier and M. Rieke and B. A. Smith and R. J. Terrile and R. I. Thompson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9812187},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
LATEX, 10 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters