A Candidate Substellar Companion to CD -33°7795 (TWA 5)
Schneider, Glenn; Hines, Dean C.; Terrile, Richard J.; Smith, Bradford A.; Zuckerman, B.; Rieke, Marcia; Kirkpatrick, J. Davy; Lowrance, Patrick J.; Thompson, Rodger I.; Becklin, E. E.; McCarthy, Chris; Webb, R. A.; Koerner, David W.; Low, Frank; Meier, Roland
United States
Abstract
We present the discovery of a candidate substellar object in a survey of young stars in the solar vicinity using the sensitivity and spatial resolution afforded by the NICMOS coronagraph on the Hubble Space Telescope. The H=12.1 mag object was discovered approximately 2" from the TW Hydrae association member CD -33°7795 (TWA 5), and the photometry implies a spectral type M8-M8.5, with a temperature of ~2600 K. We estimate that the probability of a chance alignment with a background object of this nature is less than 2×10-5 and therefore postulate that the object (TWA 5B) is physically associated at a projected separation of 100 AU. Given the likely youth of the primary (~10 Myr), current brown dwarf cooling models predict a mass of ~20MJup for TWA 5B.