Related papers: A brown dwarf mass donor in an accreting binary
Increasing observations of white dwarf atmospheric pollution and disrupting planetesimals is driving increased studies into the fate of exo-asteroids around post-main-sequence stars. Planetesimal populations in the Solar System which are…
The formation of brown dwarfs (BDs) poses a key challenge to star formation theory. The observed dearth of nearby ($\leq 5$ AU) brown dwarf companions to solar-mass stars, known as the brown dwarf desert, as well as the tendency for…
The recent discovery of microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud has excited much interest in the nature of the lensing population. Detailed analyses indicate that the mass of these objects ranges from 0.3-0.8 solar masses,…
Microlensing is one of the most promising methods of reconstructing the stellar mass function down to masses even below the hydrogen-burning limit. The fundamental limit to this technique is the presence of unresolved binaries, which can in…
A planetary growth rate, a.k.a., the mass accretion rate, is a fundamental parameter in planet formation, as it determines a planet's final mass. Planetary mass accretion rates have been estimated using hydrogen lines, based on the models…
The masses of compact objects like white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes are fundamental to astrophysics, but very difficult to measure. We present the results of an analysis of subluminous B (sdB) stars in close binary systems with…
Searches for companions of brown dwarfs by direct imaging mainly probe orbital separations > 3-10 AU. On the other hand, previous radial velocity surveys of brown dwarfs are mainly sensitive to separations smaller than 0.6 AU. It has been…
Eclipsing brown dwarfs are important calibrators of sub-stellar evolution models used to infer the characteristics of directly imaged brown dwarfs and giant exoplanets. Only two double brown dwarf eclipsing binary systems are known, among…
We report on a search for evidence of binarity in Far-Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer (FUSE) observations of DAO white dwarfs. Spectra recorded by FUSE are built up from a number of separate exposures. Observation of changes in the…
White dwarf stars frequently experience external pollution by heavy elements, and yet the intrinsically carbon-enriched DQ spectral class members fail to exhibit this phenomenon, representing a decades-old conundrum. This study reports a…
We analyze the currently available observations of X-ray binaries in a consistent way, to re-determine the masses of the neutron stars in these systems. In particular, our attention is focussed on a realistic and consistent assessment of…
The theory of binary evolution predicts that many massive stars should lose their hydrogen-rich envelopes via interaction with a companion -- revealing hot helium stars with masses of $\sim$2--8M$_{\odot}$. However, only one candidate…
We present an analysis of multi-epoch spectroscopic and photometric observations of the WZ Sge-type dwarf nova BW Scl, a period-bouncer candidate. We detected multiple irradiation-induced emission lines from the donor star allowing the…
The application of standard accretion theory to observations of X-ray binaries provides valuable insights into neutron star properties, such as their spin period and magnetic field. However, most studies concentrate on relatively old…
By definition, brown dwarfs never reach the main-sequence, cooling and dimming over their entire lifetime, thus making substellar models challenging to test because of the strong dependence on age. Currently, most brown dwarfs with…
We report on the discovery of the young, nearby, brown dwarf 2MASS J0041353$-$562112. The object has a spectral type of M7.5, it shows Li absorption and signatures of accretion, which implies that it still has a disk and suggests an age…
Precise measurements of the fundamental properties of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs are key to understanding the physics underlying their formation and evolution. While there has been great progress over the last decade in studying the…
We present FUSE H Lyman series spectroscopy of the hot white dwarf companion to the 4th magnitude A1III star Beta Crateris, which shows that is has an unusually low mass, 0.43Msun, and has almost certainly evolved through binary…
Increasing numbers of sub-stellar companions are now being discovered via direct imaging. Orbital elements for some of these objects have been derived using star--companion astrometry, and several of these appear to have eccentricities…
Pulsars in close, eccentric binary systems are usually assumed to have another neutron star as a companion. These double neutron star binaries have proven to be the best laboratories for experimental General Relativity and are the most…