* Astronomy

An Infrared Coronagraphic Survey for Substellar Companions
Authors: P.Lowrance (SSC), E. E. Becklin (UCLA), G. Schneider (UofA), D. Kirkpatrick (IPAC), A.Weinberger (Carnegie), B. Zuckerman (UCLA), C.Dumas (ESO), J.L.Beuzit (Grenoble), P.Plait (Sonoma State), E.Malumuth (Goddard), S.Heap (Goddard), R.Terrile (JPL), D. Hines (SSI)

Researchers have used the F160W filter (1.4-1.8 um) and the coronagraph on the Near-InfraRed Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to survey 45 single stars with a median age of 0.15 billion years, an average distance of 30 pc, and an average H-magnitude of 7 mag.

For the median age they were capable of detecting a 30 jupiter mass companion at separations between 15 and 200 AU.
A 5 Jupiter mass object could have been detected at 30 AU around 36% of their primary targets.



For several of the targets that were less than 30 million years old, the lower mass limit was as low as a Jupiter mass, well into the high mass planet region.
Results of the entire survey include the proper motion verification of five low-mass stellar companions, two brown dwarfs (HR7329B and TWA5B) and one possible brown dwarf binary (Gl 577B/C).

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