TY - JOUR
T1 - JWST/NIRCam discovery of the first Y+Y brown dwarf binary
T2 - WISE J033605.05-014350.4
AU - Calissendorff, Per
AU - De Furio, Matthew
AU - Meyer, Michael
AU - Albert, Loïc
AU - Aganze, Christian
AU - Ali-Dib, Mohamad
AU - Bardalez Gagliuffi, Daniella C.
AU - Baron, Frederique
AU - Beichman, Charles A.
AU - Burgasser, Adam J.
AU - Cushing, Michael C.
AU - Faherty, Jacqueline Kelly
AU - Fontanive, Clémence
AU - Gelino, Christopher R.
AU - Gizis, John E.
AU - Greenbaum, Alexandra Z.
AU - Kirkpatrick, J. Davy
AU - Leggett, Sandy K.
AU - Martinache, Frantz
AU - Mary, David
AU - N’Diaye, Mamadou
AU - Pope, Benjamin J. S.
AU - Roellig, Thomas
AU - Sahlmann, Johannes
AU - Sivaramakrishnan, Anand
AU - Thorngren, Daniel Peter
AU - Ygouf, Marie
AU - Vandal, Thomas
N1 - © 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.
PY - 2023/4/1
Y1 - 2023/4/1
N2 - We report the discovery of the first brown dwarf binary system with a Y dwarf primary, WISE J033605.05−014350.4, observed with NIRCam on JWST with the F150W and F480M filters. We employed an empirical point-spread function binary model to identify the companion, located at a projected separation of 0.″084, position angle of 295°, and with contrasts of 2.8 and 1.8 mag in F150W and F480M, respectively. At a distance of 10 pc based on its Spitzer parallax, and assuming a random inclination distribution, the physical separation is approximately 1 au. Evolutionary models predict for that an age of 1-5 Gyr, the companion mass is about 4-12.5 Jupiter masses around the 7.5-20 Jupiter mass primary, corresponding to a companion-to-host mass fraction of q = 0.61 ± 0.05. Under the assumption of a Keplerian orbit the period for this extreme binary is in the range of 5-9 yr. The system joins a small but growing sample of ultracool dwarf binaries with effective temperatures of a few hundreds of Kelvin. Brown dwarf binaries lie at the nexus of importance for understanding the formation mechanisms of these elusive objects, as they allow us to investigate whether the companions formed as stars or as planets in a disk around the primary.
AB - We report the discovery of the first brown dwarf binary system with a Y dwarf primary, WISE J033605.05−014350.4, observed with NIRCam on JWST with the F150W and F480M filters. We employed an empirical point-spread function binary model to identify the companion, located at a projected separation of 0.″084, position angle of 295°, and with contrasts of 2.8 and 1.8 mag in F150W and F480M, respectively. At a distance of 10 pc based on its Spitzer parallax, and assuming a random inclination distribution, the physical separation is approximately 1 au. Evolutionary models predict for that an age of 1-5 Gyr, the companion mass is about 4-12.5 Jupiter masses around the 7.5-20 Jupiter mass primary, corresponding to a companion-to-host mass fraction of q = 0.61 ± 0.05. Under the assumption of a Keplerian orbit the period for this extreme binary is in the range of 5-9 yr. The system joins a small but growing sample of ultracool dwarf binaries with effective temperatures of a few hundreds of Kelvin. Brown dwarf binaries lie at the nexus of importance for understanding the formation mechanisms of these elusive objects, as they allow us to investigate whether the companions formed as stars or as planets in a disk around the primary.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85153886101&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3847/2041-8213/acc86d
DO - 10.3847/2041-8213/acc86d
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85153886101
SN - 2041-8205
VL - 947
SP - 1
EP - 6
JO - Astrophysical Journal Letters
JF - Astrophysical Journal Letters
IS - 2
M1 - L30
ER -