Close Binary System HD 87646 Appears to Have a Brown Dwarf and a hot Jupiter

Very Low-Mass Stellar and Substellar Companions to Solar-like Stars From MARVELS VI: A Giant Planet and a Brown Dwarf Candidate in a Close Binary System HD 87646

Authors:

Ma et al

Abstract:

We report the detections of a giant planet (MARVELS-7b) and a brown dwarf candidate (MARVELS-7c) around the primary star in the close binary system, HD 87646. It is the first close binary system with more than one substellar circum-primary companion discovered to the best of our knowledge. The detection of this giant planet was accomplished using the first multi-object Doppler instrument (KeckET) at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope. Subsequent radial velocity observations using ET at Kitt Peak National Observatory, HRS at HET, the "Classic" spectrograph at the Automatic Spectroscopic Telescope at Fairborn Observatory, and MARVELS from SDSS-III confirmed this giant planet discovery and revealed the existence of a long-period brown dwarf in this binary. HD 87646 is a close binary with a separation of ∼22 AU between the two stars, estimated using the Hipparcos catalogue and our newly acquired AO image from PALAO on the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar. The primary star in the binary, HD 87646A, has Teff = 5770±80K, log(g)=4.1±0.1 and [Fe/H] = −0.17±0.08. The derived minimum masses of the two substellar companions of HD 87646A are 12.4±0.7MJup and 57.0±3.7MJup. The periods are 13.481±0.001 days and 674±4 days and the measured eccentricities are 0.05±0.02 and 0.50±0.02 respectively. Our dynamical simulations show the system is stable if the binary orbit has a large semi-major axis and a low eccentricity, which can be verified with future astrometry observations.

The MARVELS-7a ^ MARVELS-7b Question Current Understanding of Planetary Formation

Everything we know about the formation of solar systems might be wrong, says University of Florida astronomy professor Jian Ge and his postdoc, Bo Ma. They've discovered the first "binary-binary" - two massive companions around one star in a close binary system, one so-called giant planet and one brown dwarf, or "failed star" The first, called MARVELS-7a, is 12 times the mass of Jupiter, while the second, MARVELS-7b, has 57 times the mass of Jupiter.

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Target Selection forMulti-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanets Large-area Survey (MARVELS)

TARGET SELECTION FOR THE SDSS-III MARVELS SURVEY

Authors:

Paegert et al

Abstract:

We present the target selection process for the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanets Large-area Survey (MARVELS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III. MARVELS is a medium-resolution (R ~ 11,000) multi-fiber spectrograph capable of obtaining radial velocities for 60 objects at a time in order to find brown dwarfs and giant planets. The survey was configured to target dwarf stars with effective temperatures approximately between 4500 and $6250\;{\rm K}$. For the first 2 years MARVELS relied on low-resolution spectroscopic pre-observations to estimate the effective temperature and ${\rm log} (g)$ for candidate stars and then selected suitable dwarf stars from this pool. Ultimately, the pre-observation spectra proved ineffective at filtering out giant stars; many giants were incorrectly classified as dwarfs, resulting in a giant contamination rate of ~30% for the first phase of the MARVELS survey. Thereafter, the survey instead applied a reduced proper motion cut to eliminate giants and used the Infrared Flux Method to estimate effective temperatures, using only extant photmetric and proper-motion catalog information. The target selection method introduced here may be useful for other surveys that need to rely on extant catalog data for selection of specific stellar populations.