Discovery of a Brown Dwarf Companion to Gliese 570ABC: A 2MASS T Dwarf Significantly Cooler than Gliese 229B

A Review on Substellar Objects below the Deuterium Burning Mass Limit: Planets, Brown Dwarfs or What?

“Free-floating, non-deuterium-burning, substellar objects” are isolated bodies of a few Jupiter masses found in very young open clusters and associations, nearby young moving groups, and in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. They are neither brown dwarfs nor planets. In this paper, their nomenclature, history of discovery, sites of detection, formation mechanisms, and future directions of research are reviewed. Most free-floating, non-deuterium-burning, substellar objects share the same formation mechanism as low-mass stars and brown dwarfs, but there are still a few caveats, such as the value of the opacity mass limit, the minimum mass at which an isolated body can form via turbulent fragmentation from a cloud. The least massive free-floating substellar objects found to date have masses of about 0.004 Msol, but current and future surveys should aim at breaking this record. For that, we may need LSST, Euclid and WFIRST.

DISCOVERY OF TWO VERY WIDE BINARIES WITH ULTRACOOL COMPANIONS AND A NEW BROWN DWARF AT THE L/T TRANSITION

We present the discovery and spectroscopic follow-up of a nearby late-type L dwarf (2M0614+3950), and two extremely wide very-low-mass binary systems (2M0525-7425AB and 2M1348-1344AB), resulting from our search for common proper motion pairs containing ultracool components in the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) catalogs. The near-infrared spectrum of 2M0614+3950 indicates a spectral type L9 ± 1 object residing at a distance of 26.0 ± 1.8 pc. The optical spectrum of 2M0525-7425A reveals an M3.0 ± 0.5 dwarf primary, accompanied by a secondary previously classified as L2. The system has an angular separation of ~ 44″, equivalent to ~ 2000 AU at distance of 46.0 ± 3.0 pc. Using optical and infrared spectra, respectively, we classify the components of 2M1348-1344AB as M4.5 ± 0.5 and T5.5 ± 1. The angular separation of ~ 68″ is equivalent to ~ 1400 AU at a distance of 20.7 ± 1.4 pc. 2M1348-1344AB is one of only six very wide (separation > 1000 AU) systems containing late T dwarfs known to date.