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Deriving the true mass of an unresolved BD companion by AO aided astrometry. Eva Meyer MPIA, Heidelberg Supervisor: Martin Kürster New Technologies for Probing the Diversity of Brown Dwarfs and Exoplanets 19-24 July 2009. What do I do ?.
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Deriving the true mass of an unresolved BD companion by AO aided astrometry Eva Meyer MPIA, Heidelberg Supervisor: Martin Kürster New Technologies for Probing the Diversity of Brown Dwarfs and Exoplanets 19-24 July 2009
What do I do ? • Astrometric follow-up observation of an RV discovered Brown Dwarf companion to an M-Dwarf from ground with AO (Kürster et al. 2008) • That means: measuring the movement of the host star in the plane perpendicular to the line of sight • Combining RV data with astrometric data to derive the true mass • Orbital parameters from RV: P, e, a, ω, T0 • RV only gives minimum mass m sini
The Fit Parameters • Need to fit 7 parameters simultaneously • 2 coordinate zero-points, 0, 0 • 2 proper motions, , • 1 parallax, • 1 inclination, i • 1 longitude of the ascending node, 4 observations minimum
The candidate - GJ 1046 • Brown Dwarf orbiting an M2.5V-star (Kürster et al. 2008) • K = 7.03 mag • Distance ~ 14 pc • Minimum companion mass: m sini = 27 MJup • P = 169 d, a = 0.42 AU, e = 0.26 • Brown Dwarf desert candidate • Expected minimum peak-to-peak signal: 3.7 mas • Aimed precision: 0.5 mas • Reference star at separation of ~ 30’’ (by chance)
Observations • Observations started last summer with NACO @ VLT, S27 camera • 8 observations in roughly 3 week intervals K = 7.03 mag K = 13.52 mag DSS
i=45 =60 i=30 =150 no companion Difficulties • Parallax movement • to faint for a good HIPPARCOS parallax • Maximum mass: 112 MJup • Probability of stellar companion: 2.9 %
Data Reduction • Flatfield, dark correction • Images stacked with Jitter routine (eclipse) • PSF fitted with Moffat-function • Positional error estimation from fit with Bootstrap resampling method • 0.009 mas (0.012 mas) bright star • 0.286 mas (0.579 mas) faint reference star
Astrometric Corrections • Differential Aberration: • Relativistic effect due to movement of earth • need to know exact position of stars • Error due to abs. pos. error ~1μas or less • Atmospheric Refraction • Negligible due to narrow band filter • Plate-scale changes • Less than 1% (Köhler et al. 2008)
Reference field in 47 Tuc • Immediately before target • Derive change of plate-scale over observations • Check rotation of field
Current Status • Working on orbit-fit • Derive plate-scale changes and see how big this effect is • Observing time in P83, last chance to observe target with NACO, + 3 datapoints • Derive proper motion independently, long baseline
Summary: • One needs additional techniques to derive mass of a planet besides RV astrometry (transit) • 7 parameters to fit • Very high precision ~0.5 mas or better • But plate-scale variability needs to be monitored carefully • More than one reference star is preferable but difficult with the small FoV of today’s AO systems