Bibcode
DOI
Martín, E. L.; Basri, G.; Brandner, W.; Bouvier, J.; Zapatero Osorio, M. R.; Rebolo, R.; Stauffer, J.; Allard, F.; Baraffe, I.; Hodgkin, S. T.
Bibliographical reference
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 509, Issue 2, pp. L113-L116.
Advertised on:
12
1998
Journal
Citations
30
Refereed citations
27
Description
Hubble Space Telescope Near-Infrared Camera and Multiobject Spectrometer
(NICMOS) observations of six brown dwarf candidates in the Pleiades open
cluster are presented. One of them, namely CFHT-Pl-18, is clearly
resolved as a binary with an angular separation of 0.33". The very low
density of contaminating background stars in our images and the
photometry of the components support that this system is a physical
binary rather than a chance projection. All of the available photometric
and spectroscopic data indicate that the CFHT-Pl-18 system is likely a
member of the Pleiades cluster, but a final confirmation will have to
wait until lithium can be detected. Assuming cluster membership, we
compare our NICMOS photometry with evolutionary models and find that the
inclusion of the effects of dust grains is necessary for fitting the
data. We estimate that the masses of the components are about 0.045 and
0.035 M_solar. The binary system has a projected separation of 42 AU
(for a distance of 125 pc) that is common among stellar binaries.