arXiv:1609.02796v2 [astro-ph.SR] 13 Sep 2016
ACTA ASTRONOMICA Vol. 66 (2016) pp. 0–0
High proper motion objects towards the inner Milky Way: characterisation of newly identified nearby stars from the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea Survey G r o m a d z k i 1,2 , M., K u r t e v 2,1 , R., B e a m í n 1,2 , J. C., T e k o l a 3 , A., R a m p h u l 4,5 , R., I v a n o v 6 , V. D., M i n n i t i 7,1,8 , D., F o l k e s 9,2 , S. L., V a i s a n e n 4,10 , P., K n i a z e v 4,10,11 , A. Y., B o r i s s o v a 2,1 , J., P a r s o n s 12 , S. G. and V i l l a n u e v a 1,2 , V. 1
Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, Av. Vicua Mackenna 4860, 782-0436, Macul, Santiago, Chile 2 Instituto de Física y Astronomía, Universidad de Valparaíso, Av. Gran Bretaña 1111, Playa Ancha, Casilla 5030, Valparaíso, Chile e-mail:
[email protected] 3 Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, Inc., 6740 Cortona Drive, Suite 102, Goleta, CA 93117, USA 4 South African Astronomical Observatory, P.O. Box 9 7935, South Africa 5 University of Cape Town, Astronomy Department, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa 6 European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany 7 Departamento de Ciencias Físicas, Universidad Andres Bello, Republica 220, Santiago, Chile 8 Vatican Observatory, V00120 Vatican City State, Italy 9 Centre for Astrophysics Research, Science and Technology Research Institute, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK 10 Southern African Large Telescope Foundation, P.O. Box 9 7935, South Africa 11 Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia 12 Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7RH, UK Received June 10, 2016
ABSTRACT The census of the Solar neighbourhood is still incomplete, as demonstrated by recent discoveries of many objects within 5–10 pc from the Sun. The area around the mid-plane and bulge of the Milky Way presents the most difficulties in searches for such nearby objects, and is therefore deficient in the known population. This is largely due to high stellar densities encountered. Spectroscopic, photometric and kinematic characterization of these objects allows better understand the local mass function, the binary fraction, and provides new interesting targets for more detailed studies. We report the spectroscopic follow-up and characterisation of 12 bright high PM objects, identified from
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the VISTA Variables in Vía Láctea survey (VVV). We used the 1.9-m telescope of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) for low-resolution optical spectroscopy and spectral classification, and the MPG/ESP 2.2m telescope Fiber-fed Extended Range Optical Spectrograph (FEROS) high-resolution optical spectroscopy to obtain the radial and space velocities for three of them. Six of our objects have co-moving companions. We derived optical spectral types and photometric distances, and classified all of them as K and M dwarfs within 27 – 264 pc of the Sun. Finally, we found that one of the sources, VVV J141421.23-602326.1 (a co-moving companion of VVV J141420.55602337.1), appears to be a rare massive white dwarf that maybe close to the ZZ Ceti instability strip. Many of the objects in our list are interesting targets for exoplanet searches. Key words: proper motions – stars: low-mass – (stars:) white dwarfs – (stars:) binaries: visual – (Galaxy:) solar neighbourhood – techniques: spectroscopic.
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Introduction
M-dwarfs account for over 70% of stellar systems in the solar vicinity (Henry et al. 1997). Most of them are single (∼60-70%; Fischer & Marcy 1992; Bergfors et al. 2010), making them more likely to host (potentially habitable) planets (e.g. Kraus et al. 2012). For comparison, the single star fraction is ∼54% for solar-type stars (Duquennoy & Marcy 1991; Raghavan et al. 2010) and it is ∼0% for massive stars (Preibisch et al. 1999). This makes M-type dwarf stars the most numerous potential planet hosts of all the stellar classes (Lada 2006). Furthermore, all exoplanet detection methods (radial velocity, transits, direct imaging with Adaptive Optics and astrometry) are more sensitive to planets with host stars of lower masses. A number of exoplanet search programs are aggressively targeting M-dwarfs with radial velocities (e.g. M2K; Apps et al. 2010) and with transits (RoPACS and MEarth; Irwin et al. 2014). The first exoplanet to be imaged was orbiting a brown dwarf (BD) at ∼ 70 pc (Chauvin et al. 2005), and there is a on-going debate for an astrometrically discovered third planetary mass body in a nearby BD pair at ∼ 2.3 pc (Boffin et al. 2014; Sahlmann & Lazorenko 2015). One of the most powerful methods to identify nearby stars is through identifying proper motion (PM), and by exploiting a PM search at infrared wavelengths, offers an additional advantage: cool objects are intrinsically brighter at those wavelengths than in the optical because their spectral energy distributions peak at λ >1 µm (Lépine & Gaidos 2011) published an all-sky catalog of M-dwarfs with apparent near-InfraRed (near-IR) magnitude J 40 mas yr −1 , supplemented at the bright end with the TYCHO-2 catalogue. Recently, Lepine et al. (2013) presented a spectroscopic catalog of the 1564 brightest (J
