Discovery of a Very Low-Mass Binary with HSTNICMOS.pdf

a r X i v : a s t r o - p h / 9 8 1 0 3 8 7 v 1 2 3 O c t 1 9 9 8 Discovery of a Very Low-Mass Binary with HST/NICMOS E.L. Mart??n and G. Basri Astronomy Department, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 W. Brandner Jet Propulsion Laboratory/IPAC, Mail Code 100-22, Pasadena, CA 91125 J. Bouvier Observatoire de Grenoble, B.P.53, F-38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France M. R. Zapatero Osorio and R. Rebolo Instituto de Astrof??sica de Canarias, 38200 La Laguna, Spain J. Stauffer Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138 F. Allard and I. Baraffe CRAL, Ecole Normale Superieure, 46 Alee d’Italie, Lyon, 69364 France and S. T. Hodgkin Astronomy Group, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Leicester University, University Road, Leicester, LEI 7RH, England, UK contact e-mail address: ege@popsicle.berkeley.edu Received ; accepted accepted by ApJ Letters – 2 – ABSTRACT Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS observations are presented of six brown dwarf candidates in the Pleiades open cluster. 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 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 M⊙ and 0.035 M⊙. The binary system has a projected separation of 42 AU (for a distance of 125 pc) that is common among stellar binaries. Subject headings: surveys — binaries: general — stars: formation — stars: evolution — stars: low-mass, br