Very Low Mass Companions from the First Two Years of SDSS-III MARVELS
Abstract
The SDSS-III MARVELS survey is a comprehensive radial velocity survey of 3,300 nearby F through K stars, between magnitudes 7.6 < V < 12.0. The primary goal of this survey is to search for planets among a homogeneous set of stars, which will be used to put constraints on formation and evolution models. This survey is also very sensitive to more massive companions such as brown dwarfs and low mass binaries. We will discuss an ongoing project aimed at characterizing the properties of these very low-mass stellar and substellar (VLMSS) companions with minimum masses between 20 and 100 Jupiter masses. As part of the first two years of the MARVELS project 2,580 stars were searched for VLMSS companions with periods from 1.1 to 360 days using a modified Lomb-Scargle periodogram, yielding 12 VLMSS companions. This poster details the spectroscopic and imaging follow-up of these VLMSS companions, and presents an overview of our meta-study to determine the nature of the 'brown dwarf desert' including the role of parameters like host-star spectral type and metallicity. Finally, this large homogeneous radial velocity survey will be placed in the larger context of our current knowledge about VLMSS statistics.
This work was supported by the W.M. Keck Foundation, NSF, SDSS-III collaboration, NASA, and UF.- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #219
- Pub Date:
- January 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AAS...21934520D