A Cautionary Tale: MARVELS Brown Dwarf Candidate Reveals Itself to be a Very Long Period, Highly Eccentric Spectroscopic Stellar Binary

Mack, Claude E., III; Ge, Jian; Deshpande, Rohit; Wisniewski, John P.; Stassun, Keivan G.; Gaudi, B. Scott; Fleming, Scott W.; Mahadevan, Suvrath; De Lee, Nathan; Eastman, Jason; Ghezzi, Luan; González-Hernández, J. I.; Femenía, B.; Ferreira, Letícia; Porto de Mello, Gustavo; Crepp, Justin R.; Mata-Sánchez, D.; Agol, Eric; Beatty, Thomas G.; Bizyaev, Dmitry; Brewington, Howard; Cargile, Phillip A.; da Costa, Luiz N.; Esposito, M.; Ebelke, Garret; Hebb, Leslie; Jiang, Peng; Kane, Stephen R.; Lee, Brian; Maia, Marcio A. G.; Malanushenko, Elena; Malanushenko, Victor; Oravetz, Daniel; Paegert, Martin; Pan, Kaike; Allende-Prieto, C.; Pepper, Joshua; Rebolo, R.; Roy, Arpita; Santiago, Basílio X.; Schneider, Donald P.; Simmons, Audrey; Siverd, Robert J.; Snedden, Stephanie; Tofflemire, Benjamin M.
Bibliographical reference

The Astronomical Journal, Volume 145, Issue 5, article id. 139, 15 pp. (2013).

Advertised on:
5
2013
Number of authors
45
IAC number of authors
6
Citations
10
Refereed citations
9
Description
We report the discovery of a highly eccentric, double-lined spectroscopic binary star system (TYC 3010-1494-1), comprising two solar-type stars that we had initially identified as a single star with a brown dwarf companion. At the moderate resolving power of the MARVELS spectrograph and the spectrographs used for subsequent radial-velocity (RV) measurements (R <~ 30, 000), this particular stellar binary mimics a single-lined binary with an RV signal that would be induced by a brown dwarf companion (Msin i ~ 50 M Jup) to a solar-type primary. At least three properties of this system allow it to masquerade as a single star with a very-low-mass companion: its large eccentricity (e ~ 0.8), its relatively long period (P ~ 238 days), and the approximately perpendicular orientation of the semi-major axis with respect to the line of sight (ω ~ 189°). As a result of these properties, for ~95% of the orbit the two sets of stellar spectral lines are completely blended, and the RV measurements based on centroiding on the apparently single-lined spectrum is very well fit by an orbit solution indicative of a brown dwarf companion on a more circular orbit (e ~ 0.3). Only during the ~5% of the orbit near periastron passage does the true, double-lined nature and large RV amplitude of ~15 km s–1 reveal itself. The discovery of this binary system is an important lesson for RV surveys searching for substellar companions; at a given resolution and observing cadence, a survey will be susceptible to these kinds of astrophysical false positives for a range of orbital parameters. Finally, for surveys like MARVELS that lack the resolution for a useful line bisector analysis, it is imperative to monitor the peak of the cross-correlation function for suspicious changes in width or shape, so that such false positives can be flagged during the candidate vetting process.
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