English

Discovery of 34 low-mass comoving systems using NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2022-06-15 v2 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present the discovery of 34 comoving systems containing an ultra-cool dwarf found by means of the NOIRLab Source Catalog (NSC) DR2. NSC's angular resolution of \sim1" allows for the detection of small separation binaries with significant proper motions. We used the catalog's accurate proper motion measurements to identify the companions by cross-matching a previously compiled list of brown dwarf candidates with NSC DR2. The comoving pairs consist of either a very low-mass star and an ultra-cool companion, or a white dwarf and an ultra-cool companion. The estimated spectral types of the primaries are in the K and M dwarf regimes, those of the secondaries in the M, L and T dwarf regimes. We calculated angular separations between \sim2 and \sim56", parallactic distances between \sim43 and \sim261 pc and projected physical separations between \sim169 and \sim8487 AU. The lowest measured total proper motion is 97 mas yr1^{-1}, the highest 314 mas yr1^{-1}. Tangential velocities range from \sim23 to \sim187 km s1^{-1}. We also determined comoving probabilities, estimated mass ratios and calculated binding energies for each system. We found no indication of possible binarity for any component of the 34 systems in the published literature. The discovered systems can contribute to the further study of the formation and evolution of low-mass systems as well as to the characterization of cool substellar objects.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.09739,
  title  = {Discovery of 34 low-mass comoving systems using NOIRLab Source Catalog DR2},
  author = {Frank Kiwy and Jacqueline K. Faherty and Aaron Meisner and Adam C. Schneider and J. Davy Kirkpatrick and Marc J. Kuchner and Adam J. Burgasser and Sarah Casewell and Rocio Kiman and Emily Calamari and Christian Aganze and Chih-Chun Hsu and Arttu Sainio and Vinod Thakur and The Backyard Worlds and : and Planet 9 Collaboration},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.09739},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal

R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:53:56.120Z