New Technology Adds Four More Brown Dwarfs to the Only 40 Imaged in Decades

Brown dwarfs, intriguing objects that straddle the star-planet boundary, are crucial to our knowledge of stellar and planetary populations.

In nearly three decades of searching, however, just 40 brown dwarfs could be observed surrounding stars.

Thanks to a novel revolutionary search approach, an international team has directly photographed four new brown dwarfs.

Newly discovered brown dwarf

(Photo : NASA/APL/SwRI via Getty Images)

Despite significant attempts to develop new observation equipment and image synthesis methods, precise detection methods of the brown dwarf companion to stars have remained few, with just roughly 40 systems observed in over three decades of studies, as per ScienceDaily.

According to a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society MNRAS, researchers led by Mariangela Bonavita of the Open University and Clémence Fontanive of the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) and the NCCR PlanetS at the University of Bern directly imaged four new brown dwarfs.

This is the first time that lots of new structures with brown dwarf associates on wide planetary distances have been declared at the same time.

New innovative method

Mariangela Bonavita explains that wide-orbit brown dwarf partners are rare to begin with, and discovering them directly involves significant technical problems because the host stars fully obscure our telescopes.

Most previous studies have been based on randomly selecting stars from nascent clusters. Clémence Fontanive argues that another way to enhance the number of detections is to just look at stars that exhibit signs of another object in their system.

The way a star moves under the gravitational pull of a partner, whether that companion be a star, a planet, or something in between, can be an indicator of its presence.

COPAINS Pilot Survey

As part of the COPAINS Pilot Survey, astronomers from the Astronomical Observatory of Padova, Italy, and abroad observed 25 stars, as per Phys.org.

As a consequence, four new brown dwarfs were discovered and given the names HIP 21152 B, HIP 29724 B, HD 60584 B, and HIP 63734 B. The findings were published on the arXiv pre-print service on May 4th.

Brown dwarfs discovered recently are sub-stellar partners of young stars (with ages below one billion years). These stars are thought to have masses ranging from 1.04 to 1.44 solar masses.

HIP 21152 B, HIP 29724 B, HD 60584 B, and HIP 63734 B had masses of 0.032, 0.063, 0.028, and 0.012, respectively, according to the research. They are 18.3, 6.3, 16.6, and 30 AU away from their host stars, respectively.

COPAINS' capacity to restrict the underlying planet and sub-stellar companion population has been demonstrated by the researchers.

COPAINS surveys, they continued, provide an obviously efficient selection approach, with a far greater success rate (when compared to other surveys) and a significantly shorter time investment.

Despite the multiple assumptions and constraints of the work undertaken in this pilot survey, the high detection rate reported here significantly confirms the usage of such techniques in survey designs, according to the astronomers.

They are hoping that the ESA's Gaia satellite's third data release (DR3), due in June 2022, along with COPAINS may produce further fascinating sub-stellar companion findings.

They went on to say that it would allow for a large reduction in the method's uncertainty, allowing future surveys to focus on targets with accelerations induced by planetary-mass partners.