Near-Infrared Light Curves of a Young, Eclipsing Binary of Brown Dwarfs

We present the near-infrared light curves for an eclipsing binary system, 2MASS J05352184-0546085, in which both components are brown dwarfs (Stassun et al. 2006). The system is a member of the Orion Nebula Cluster, and therefore has a likely age of only a few million years.

We model light curves using a Wilson-Devinney based code to derive fundamental system properties, including effective temperatures and radii. Our analysis includes JHK light curves obtained with the 1.3m SMARTS telescope at CTIO in Chile.

A thorough spectroscopic and photometric analysis of eclipsing binary systems yields highly accurate properties of the system and of its components, in such a manner that they are determined independently of their distance and other assumptions. The masses of both components, 0.054 and 0.034 Msun, have been measured with accuracies better than 10%.

This system is of particular interest because it provides with the measurements of the two least massive of pre-main-sequence objects known to date, and consequently provides useful data for testing the predictions of current early evolution and star formation models.