Hunting for Candidates in the Brown Dwarf Desert

The SOPHIE search for northern extrasolar planets IX. Populating the brown dwarf desert

Authors:

Wilson et al

Abstract:

Radial velocity planet search surveys of nearby Solar-type stars have shown a strong deficit of brown dwarf companions within ∼5AU. There is presently no comprehensive explanation of this lack of brown dwarf companions, therefore, increasing the sample of such objects is crucial to understand their formation and evolution. Based on precise radial velocities obtained using the SOPHIE spectrograph at Observatoire de Haute-Provence we characterise the orbital parameters of 15 companions to solar-type stars and constrain their true mass using astrometric data from the Hipparcos space mission. The nine companions not shown to be stellar in nature have minimum masses ranging from ~13 to 70MJup, and are well distributed across the planet/brown dwarf mass regime, making them an important contribution to the known population of massive companions around solar-type stars. We characterise six companions as stellar in nature with masses ranging from a minimum mass of 76±4MJup to a mass of 0.35±0.03M⊙. The orbital parameters of two previously known sub-stellar candidates are improved.