The Optical Mass-Luminosity Relation at the End of the Main Sequence (0.08-0.20 M_solar)

Abstract

The empirical mass-luminosity relation at M_V is presented for stars with masses 0.08-0.20 M_solar based upon new observations made with Fine Guidance Sensor 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope. The targets are nearby, red dwarf multiple systems in which the magnitude differences are typically measured to +/-0.1 mag or better. The M_V values are generated using the best available parallaxes and are also accurate to +/-0.1 mag, because the errors in the magnitude differences are the dominant error source. In several cases this is the first time the observed sub-arcsecond multiples have been resolved at optical wavelengths. The mass-luminosity relation defined by these data reaches to M_V=18.5 and provides a powerful empirical test for discriminating the lowest mass stars from high-mass brown dwarfs at wavelengths shorter than 1 μm.

Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555.