Related papers: A possible dividing line between massive planets a…

The recent detection of the transit of very massive substellar companions (CoRoT-3b, Deleuil et al. 2008; CoRoT-15b, Bouchy et al. 2010; WASP-30b, Anderson et al. 2010; Hat-P-20b, Bakos et al. 2010) provides a strong constraint to planet…

We present the first results of a large imaging survey to identify wide brown dwarf companions to stars within 10 pc. We have performed a deep (H-band limit ~ 19.0 mag), wide field (up to 16x16 arcmin) astrometric imaging campaign in two…

Brown dwarfs constitute a missing link between low-mass stars and giant planets. Their atmospheres display chemical species typical of planets, and one could wonder whether they also have weather-like patterns. While brown dwarf surface…

We report new VLT/NACO imaging observations of the young, nearby brown dwarf 2MASSW J1207334-393254 and its suggested planetary mass companion (2M1207 b). Three epochs of VLT/NACO measurements obtained over nearly one year show that the…

Giant planets form in protoplanetary disks while these disks are still gas-rich, and can reveal their presence through the annular gaps they carve out. HD 100546 is a gas-rich disk with a wide gap between between a radius of ~1 and 13 AU,…

Context. Many efforts are being made to characterize extrasolar planetary systems and unveil the fundamental mechanisms of planet formation. An important aspect of the problem, which remains largely unknown, is to understand how the planet…

Giant planets and brown dwarfs are thought to form via a combination of pathways, including bottom-up mechanisms in which gas is accreted onto a solid core and top-down mechanisms in which gas collapses directly into a gravitationally-bound…

Studies have shown that remnants of destroyed planets and debris-disk planetesimals can survive the volatile evolution of their host stars into white dwarfs, but detection of intact planetary bodies around white dwarfs are few. Simulations…

Microlensing is sensitive to binary, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to normal stars in the Galactic bulge with separations between about 1-10 AU. The accurate, densely-sampled photometry of microlensing events needed to detect…

A substellar-mass object in orbit at about 300 astronomical units (AU) from the young low-mass star G196-3 was detected by direct imaging. Optical and infrared photometry and low- and intermediate-resolution spectroscopy of the faint…

Exoplanets which are detected using the radial velocity technique have a well-known ambiguity of their true mass, caused by the unknown inclination of the planetary orbit with respect to the plane of the sky. Constraints on the inclination…

We present the discoveries of three faint companions to young stars in the Scorpius-Centaurus region, imaged with the NICI instrument on Gemini South. We have confirmed all three companions through common proper motion tests. Follow-up…

Many potential mechanisms for delivering planetary debris to within a few Roche radii of white dwarfs rely on gravitational scattering events that feature perturbers which are giant planets or terrestrial planets. However, the population of…

Context. Brown dwarf companions to stars at separations of a few AU or less are rare objects, and none have been found so far around early-type M dwarfs M0V-M5V). With GJ 1046 (M2.5V), a strong candidate for such a system with a separation…

The orbital elements of extreme mass ratio binaries will be modified by interactions with surrounding circumstellar disks. For brown dwarf companions to Solar-type stars the resulting orbital migration is sufficient to drive short period…

Context. Though only a handful of extrasolar planets have been discovered via direct imaging, each of these discoveries had tremendous impact on our understanding of planetary formation, stellar formation and cool atmosphere physics. Aims.…

It is well-known that stars with giant planets are on average more metal-rich than stars without giant planets, whereas stars with detected low-mass planets do not need to be metal-rich. With the aim of studying the weak boundary that…

Young intermediate-mass stars have become high-priority targets for direct-imaging planet searches following the recent discoveries of planets orbiting e.g. HR 8799 and Beta Pictoris. Close stellar companions to these stars can affect the…

Electron-degenerate, pressure-ionized hydrogen (usually referred to as metallic hydrogen) is the principal constituent of brown dwarfs, the long-sought objects which lie in the mass range between the lowest-mass stars (about eighty times…

The search for substellar companions around stars with different masses along the main sequence is critical to understand the different processes leading to the formation of low-mass stars, brown dwarfs, and planets. In particular, the…