Pre-Discovery 2007 Image of the HR 8799 Planetary System

We present a pre-discovery H-band image of the HR 8799 planetary system that reveals all three planets in August 2007. The data were obtained with the Keck adaptive optics system, using angular differential imaging and a coronagraph. We confirm the physical association of all three planets, including HR 8799d, which had only been detected in 2008 images taken two months apart, and whose association with HR 8799 was least secure until now. We confirm that the planets are 2-3 mag fainter than field brown dwarfs of comparable near-infrared colors. We note that similar under-luminosity is characteristic of young substellar objects at the L/T spectral type transition, and is likely due to enhanced dust content and non-equilibrium CO/CH_4 chemistry in their atmospheres. Finally, we place an upper limit of 18 mag per square arc second on the >120 AU H-band dust-scattered light from the HR 8799 debris disk. The upper limit on the integrated scattered light flux is 1e-4 times the photospheric level, 24 times fainter than the debris ring around HR 4796A.Comment: ApJ Letters, in press; 13 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

A Substellar Common Proper Motion Companion to the Pleiad HII 1348

We announce the identification of a proper motion companion to the star HII 1348, a K5V member of the Pleiades open cluster. The existence of a faint point source 1.1arcsec away from HII 1348 was previously known from adaptive optics imaging by Bouvier et al. However, because of a high likelihood of background star contamination and in the absence of follow-up astrometry, Bouvier et al. tentatively concluded that the candidate companion was not physically associated with HII 1348. We establish the proper motion association of the pair from adaptive optics imaging with the Palomar 5m telescope. Adaptive optics spectroscopy with the integral field spectrograph OSIRIS on the Keck 10m telescope reveals that the companion has a spectral type of M8\pm1. According to substellar evolution models, the M8 spectral type resides within the substellar mass regime at the age of the Pleiades. The primary itself is a known double-lined spectroscopic binary, which makes the resolved companion, HII 1348B, the least massive and widest component of this hierarchical triple system and the first substellar companion to a stellar primary in the Pleiades.Comment: accepted by Ap

Imaging faint brown dwarf companions close to bright stars with a small, well-corrected telescope aperture

We have used our 1.6 m diameter off-axis well-corrected sub-aperture (WCS) on the Palomar Hale telescope in concert with a small inner-working-angle (IWA) phase-mask coronagraph to image the immediate environs of a small number of nearby stars. Test cases included three stars (HD 130948, HD 49197 and HR7672) with known brown dwarf companions at small separations, all of which were detected. We also present the initial detection of a new object close to the nearby young G0V star HD171488. Follow up observations are needed to determine if this object is a bona fide companion, but its flux is consistent with the flux of a young brown dwarf or low mass M star at the same distance as the primary. Interestingly, at small angles our WCS coronagraph demonstrates a limiting detectable contrast comparable to that of extant Lyot coronagraphs on much larger telescopes corrected with current-generation AO systems. This suggests that small apertures corrected to extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) levels can be used to carry out initial surveys for close brown dwarf and stellar companions, leaving followup observations for larger telescopes.Comment: accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa

Integrated-light Two Micron All Sky Survey infrared photometry of Galactic globular clusters

We have mosaicked Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) images to derive surface brightness profiles in J, H, and K_s for 104 Galactic globular clusters. We fit these with King profiles and show that the core radii are identical to within the errors for each of these IR colors and are identical to the core radii at V in essentially all cases. We derive integrated-light colors V-J, V-H, V-K_s, J-H, and J-Ks for these globular clusters. Each color shows a reasonably tight relation between the dereddened colors and metallicity. Fits to these are given for each color. The IR-IR colors have very small errors, due largely to the all-sky photometric calibration of the 2MASS survey, while the V-IR colors have substantially larger uncertainties. We find fairly good agreement with measurements of integrated-light colors for a smaller sample of Galactic globular clusters by M. Aaronson, M. Malkan, and D. Kleinmann from 1977. Our results provide a calibration for the integrated light of distant single-burst old stellar populations from very low to solar metallicities. A comparison of our dereddened measured colors with predictions from several models of the integrated light of single-burst old populations shows good agreement in the low-metallicity domain for V-K_s colors but also shows an offset at a fixed [Fe/H] of ~0.1 mag in J-K_s, which we ascribe to photometric system transformation issues. Some of the models fail to reproduce the behavior of the integrated-light colors of the Galactic globular clusters near solar metallicity

The Nearest Isolated Member of the TW Hydrae Association is a Giant Planet Analog

In a recent search for unusually red L and T dwarfs, we identified 2MASS J11193254-1137466 as a likely young L7 dwarf and potential member of the TW Hydrae association. We present spectra that confirm the youth of this object. We also measure a radial velocity of 8.5 +/- 3.3 km/s that, together with the sky position, proper motion and photometric distance, results in a 92% probability of membership in the TW Hydrae association, with a calibrated field contamination probability of 0.0005% using the BANYAN II tool. Using the age of TW Hydrae and the luminosity of 2MASS J11193254-1137466, we estimate its mass to be 4.3--7.6 MJup. It is the lowest-mass and nearest isolated member of TW Hydrae at a kinematic distance of 28.9 +/- 3.6 pc, and the second-brightest isolated <10 MJup object discovered to date.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for publication in ApJ Letter