De Lee, Nathan; Ge, Jian; Crepp, Justin R.; Eastman, Jason; Esposito, M.; Femenía, B.; Fleming, Scott W.; Gaudi, B. Scott; Ghezzi, Luan; González Hernández, J. I.; Lee, Brian L.; Stassun, Keivan G.; Wisniewski, John P.; Wood-Vasey, W. Michael; Agol, Eric; Allende-Prieto, C.; Barnes, Rory; Bizyaev, Dmitry; Cargile, Phillip; Chang, Liang; Da Costa, Luiz N.; Porto De Mello, G. F.; Ferreira, Leticia D.; Gary, Bruce; Hebb, Leslie; Holtzman, Jon; Liu, Jian; Ma, Bo; Mack, Claude E., III; Mahadevan, Suvrath; Maia, Marcio A. G.; Nguyen, Duy Cuong; Oravetz, Audrey; Oravetz, Daniel J.; Paegert, Martin; Pan, Kaike; Pepper, Joshua; Malanushenko, Elena; Malanushenko, Viktor; Rebolo, R.; Santiago, Basilio X.; Schneider, Donald P.; Shelden Bradley, Alaina C.; Wan, Xiaoke; Wang, Ji; Zhao, Bo
Bibliographical reference
The Astronomical Journal, Volume 145, Issue 6, article id. 155, 15 pp. (2013).
Description
We describe the discovery of a likely brown dwarf (BD) companion with a
minimum mass of 31.7 ± 2.0 M Jup to GSC 03546-01452
from the MARVELS radial velocity survey, which we designate as
MARVELS-6b. For reasonable priors, our analysis gives a probability of
72% that MARVELS-6b has a mass below the hydrogen-burning limit of 0.072
M ☉, and thus it is a high-confidence BD companion. It
has a moderately long orbital period of 47.8929^{+0.0063}_{-0.0062} days
with a low eccentricity of 0.1442^{+0.0078}_{-0.0073}, and a
semi-amplitude of 1644^{+12}_{-13} m s–1. Moderate
resolution spectroscopy of the host star has determined the following
parameters: T eff = 5598 ± 63, log g = 4.44 ±
0.17, and [Fe/H] = +0.40 ± 0.09. Based upon these measurements,
GSC 03546-01452 has a probable mass and radius of M * = 1.11
± 0.11 M ☉ and R * = 1.06 ±
0.23 R ☉ with an age consistent with less than ~6 Gyr
at a distance of 219 ± 21 pc from the Sun. Although MARVELS-6b is
not observed to transit, we cannot definitively rule out a transiting
configuration based on our observations. There is a visual companion
detected with Lucky Imaging at 7.''7 from the host star, but our
analysis shows that it is not bound to this system. The minimum mass of
MARVELS-6b exists at the minimum of the mass functions for both stars
and planets, making this a rare object even compared to other BDs. It
also exists in an underdense region in both period/eccentricity and
metallicity/eccentricity space.
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