Searching for faint comoving companions to the a Centauri system in the VVV survey infrared images
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Archivos
Fecha
2017-12
Profesor/a Guía
Facultad/escuela
Idioma
en
Título de la revista
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Título del volumen
Editor
Oxford University Press
Nombre de Curso
Licencia CC
Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0)
Licencia CC
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.es
Resumen
The VVV survey has observed the southern disc of the MilkyWay in the near-infrared, covering 240 deg2 in the ZYJHKs filters. We search the VVV survey images in a ~19 deg2 field around α Centauri, the nearest stellar system to the Sun, to look for possible overlooked companions that the baseline in time of VVV would be able to uncover. The photometric depth of our search reaches Y ~ 19.3mag, J ~ 19 mag, and Ks ~ 17 mag. This search has yielded no new companions in a Centauri system, setting an upper mass limit for any unseen companion well into the brown dwarf/planetary mass regime. The apparent magnitude limits were turned into effective temperature limits, and the presence of companion objects with effective temperatures warmer than 325K can be ruled out using different state-of-the-art atmospheric models. These limits were transformed into mass limits using evolutionary models, companions with masses above 11MJup were discarded, extending the constraints recently provided in the literature up to projected distances of d < 7000 au from a Cen AB and ~1 200 au from Proxima. In the next few years, the VVV extended survey (VVVX) will allow us to extend the search and place similar limits on brown dwarfs/planetary companions to a Cen AB for separations up to 20 000 au. © Crown copyright 2017.
Notas
Indexación: Scopus
Palabras clave
Brown dwarfs, Infrared: planetary systems, Planetary systems
Citación
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Volume 472, Issue 4, Pages 3952 - 395821 December 2017
DOI
10.1093/mnras/stx2144