Search

Carina is a nearby young stellar association. So far, only a small number of stars have been clearly identified as members of this association. In this paper, we reanalyse the membership of the association in light of Gaia DR2 data, in particular finding that HD 95086 is a potential member (probability of 71 per cent). This star is noteworthy as one of the few stars that hosts both a detected debris disc and a directly imaged planet. It has previously only been considered as a potential member of the Lower Centaurus Crux (LCC) – part of the Scorpius–Centaurus association. We also reanalyse the age of the Carina association. Using a Bayesian inference code applied to infer a solution from stellar evolution models for the most probable (>99 per cent) members of Carina, we infer an age for the association of 13±1 Myr, much younger than previous studies. Whilst we have revised HD 95086’s association membership from LCC to Carina, the fact that we also find Carina to have a younger age, similar to that of LCC, means that the estimates of HD 95086b’s mass remain unchanged., MB and VVH acknowledge support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through grants Kr 2164/13-2 and Ne 515/61-1 respectively. CdB acknowledges the funding of his sabbatical position through the Mexican national council for science and technology (CONACYT grant CVU No. 448248). CdB is also thankful for the support from the Jesús Serra Foundation Guest Program., {"references":["Bell C. P. M., Mamajek E. E., Naylor T., 2015, MNRAS, 454, 593","Booth M., et al., 2019, MNRAS, 482, 3443","del Burgo C., Allende Prieto C., 2018, MNRAS, 479, 1953","Gagné J., et al., 2018, ApJ, 856, 23","Gaia Collaboration et al., 2018, A&A, 616, A1","Madsen S., Dravins D., Lindegren L., 2002, A&A, 381, 446","Moór A., et al., 2013, ApJ, 775, L51","Schneider A. C., Shkolnik E. L., Allers K. N., Kraus A. L., Liu M. C., Weinberger A. J., Flagg L., 2019, AJ, 157, 234","Torres C. A. O., Quast G. R., de La Reza R., da Silva L., Melo C. H. F., 2001, in Jayawardhana R., Greene T., eds, Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series Vol. 9 244, Young Stars Near Earth: Progress and Prospects. p. 43 (arXiv:astro-ph/0105291)","Torres C. A. O., Quast G. R., Melo C. H. F., Sterzik M. F., 2008, Handbook of Star Forming Regions: Volume II, The Southern Sky. Astronomical Society of the Pacific, p. 757"]}

We introduce the SAPP (Stellar Abundances and atmospheric Parameters Pipeline), the prototype of the code that will be used to determine parameters of stars observed within the core program of the PLATO space mission. The pipeline is based on the Bayesian inference and provides effective temperature, surface gravity, metallicity, chemical abundances, and luminosity. The code in its more general version has a much wider range of potential applications. It can also provide masses, ages, and radii of stars and can be used with stellar types not targeted by the PLATO core program, such as red giants. We validate the code on a set of 27 benchmark stars that includes 19 FGK-type dwarfs, 6 GK-type subgiants, and 2 red giants. Our results suggest that combining various observables is the optimal approach, as this allows the degeneracies between different parameters to be broken and yields more accurate values of stellar parameters and more realistic uncertainties. For the PLATO core sample, we obtain a typical uncertainty of 27 (syst.) ± 37 (stat.) K for Teff, 0.00 ± 0.01 dex for log g, 0.02 ± 0.02 dex for metallicity [Fe/H], −0.01 ± 0.03 R⊙ for radii, −0.01 ± 0.05 M⊙ for stellar masses, and −0.14 ± 0.63 Gyr for ages. We also show that the best results are obtained by combining the νmax scaling relation with stellar spectra. This resolves the notorious problem of degeneracies, which is particularly important for F-type stars., This work presents results from the European Space Agency (ESA) space mission PLATO. The PLATO payload, the PLATO Ground Segment and PLATO data processing are joint developments of ESA and the PLATO Mission Consortium (PMC). Funding for the PMC is provided at national levels, in particular by countries participating in the PLATO Multilateral Agreement (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, and United Kingdom) and institutions from Brazil. Members of the PLATO Consortium can be found at https://platomission.com. The ESA PLATO mission website is https://www.cosmos.esa.int/plato. We thank the teams working for PLATO for all their work. We thank P.E. Nissen for providing the reduced spectra of the Kepler legacy stars. M.R.G., M.B., J.G., and M.K. are supported by the Lise Meitner grant from the Max Planck Society. B.P. is partially supported by CNES, the Centre National d’Études Spatiales. We acknowledge support by the Collaborative Research centre SFB 881 (projects A5, A10), Heidelberg University, of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). We thank C. Aerts for providing helpful comments to this study. This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC, https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement. A.S. acknowledges support from MICINN grant PID2019-108709GB-I00. T.M. acknowledges financial support from Belspo for contract PRODEX PLATO mission development. U.H. acknowledges support from the Swedish National Space Agency (SNSA/Rymdstyrelsen). S.M. has been supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and by the ÚNKP-20-5 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry for Innovation and Technology. N.N. acknowledges Anthony Salsi for useful discussions. V.A. is supported by FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) through national grants: UID/FIS/04434/2019; UIDB/04434/2020; UIDP/04434/2020. V.A. also acknowledges the support from FCT through Investigador FCT contract nr. IF/00650/2015/CP1273/CT0001. M.T. acknowledges the funding from MIUR Premiale 2016: MITIC. L.C. is the recipient of the ARC Future Fellowship FT160100402. M.B. is supported through the Lise Meitner grant from the Max Planck Society. We acknowledge support by the Collaborative Research centre SFB 881 (projects A5, A10), Heidelberg University, of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation). This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 949173).

The theory of substellar evolution predicts that there is a sharp mass boundary between lithium and non-lithium brown dwarfs, not far below the substellar-mass limit. The imprint of thermonuclear burning is carved on the surface lithium abundance of substellar-mass objects during the first few hundred million years of their evolution, leading to a sharp boundary between lithium and non-lithium brown dwarfs, so-called, the lithium test. New optical spectroscopic observations of the binaries DENIS+J063001.4-184014 and DENIS+J225210.7-173013 obtained using the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio de Canarias are reported here. They allow us to re-determine their combined optical spectral types (M9.5 and L6.5, respectively) and to search for the presence of the LiI resonance doublet. The non detection of the LiI feature in the combined spectrum of DENIS\,J063001.4$-$184014AB is converted into estimates for the depletion of lithium in the individual components of this binary system. In DENIS\,J225210.7$-$173013AB we report the detection of a weak LiI feature which we tentatively ascribe as arising from the contribution of the T3.5-type secondary. Combining our results with data for seven other brown dwarf binaries in the literature treated in a self-consistent way, we confirm that there is indeed a sharp transition in mass for lithium depletion in brown dwarfs, as expected from theoretical calculations. We estimate such mass boundary is observationally located at 51.48$^{+0.22}_{-4.00}$ $M_\mathrm{Jup}$, which is lower than the theoretical determinations., 12 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

Current theories of planetary evolution predict that infant giant planets have large radii and very low densities before they slowly contract to reach their final size after about several hundred million years 1, 2. These theoretical expectations remain untested to date, despite the increasing number of exoplanetary discoveries, as the detection and characterisation of very young planets is extremely challenging due to the intense stellar activity of their host stars 3, 4. However, the recent discoveries of young planetary transiting systems allow to place initial constraints on evolutionary models5–9. With an estimated age of 20 million years, V1298 Tau is one of the youngest solar-type stars known to host transiting planets: it harbours a multiple system composed of two Neptune-sized, one Saturn-sized, and one Jupiter-sized planets 10, 11. Here we report the dynamical masses of two of the four planets. We find that planet b, with an orbital period of 24 days, has a mass of 0.60 Jupiter masses and a density similar to the giant planets of the Solar System and other known giant exoplanets with significantly older ages 12, 13. Planet e, with an orbital period of 40 days, has a mass of 1.21 Jupiter masses and a density larger than most giant exoplanets. This is unexpected for planets at such a young age and suggests that some giant planets might evolve and contract faster than anticipated, thus challenging current models of planetary evolution.

Debris disks are extrasolar analogs to our own Kuiper Belt and they are detected around at least 17% of nearby Sun-like stars. The morphology and dynamics of a disk encode information about its history, as well as that of any exoplanets within the system. We used ALMA to obtain 1.3 mm observations of the debris disk around the nearby F5V star HD 170773. We image the face-on ring and determine its fundamental parameters by forward-modeling the interferometric visibilities through a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach. Using a symmetric Gaussian surface density profile, we find a 71 $\pm$ 4 au wide belt with a radius of 193$^{+2}_{-3}$ au, a relatively large radius compared to most other millimeter-resolved belts around late A / early F type stars. This makes HD 170773 part of a group of four disks around A and F stars with radii larger than expected from the recently reported planetesimal belt radius - stellar luminosity relation. Two of these systems are known to host directly imaged giant planets, which may point to a connection between large belts and the presence of long-period giant planets. We also set upper limits on the presence of CO and CN gas in the system, which imply that the exocomets that constitute this belt have CO and HCN ice mass fractions of, 14 pages, 6 figures, accepted to ApJ

Uncovering the ingredients and the architecture of planetary systems is a very active field of research that has fuelled many new theories on giant planet formation, migration, composition, and interaction with the circumstellar environment. We aim at discovering and studying new such systems, to further expand our knowledge of how low-mass companions form and evolve. We obtained high-contrast H-band images of the circumstellar environment of the F5V star HD206893, known to host a debris disc never detected in scattered light. These observations are part of the SPHERE High Angular Resolution Debris Disc Survey (SHARDDS) using the InfraRed Dual-band Imager and Spectrograph (IRDIS) installed on VLT/SPHERE. We report the detection of a source with a contrast of 3.6x10^{-5} in the H-band, orbiting at a projected separation of 270 milliarcsecond or 10 au, corresponding to a mass in the range 24 to 73 Mjup for an age of the system in the range 0.2 to 2 Gyr. The detection was confirmed ten months later with VLT/NaCo, ruling out a background object with no proper motion. A faint extended emission compatible with the disc scattered light signal is also observed. The detection of a low-mass companion inside a massive debris disc makes this system an analog of other young planetary systems such as beta Pictoris, HR8799 or HD95086 and requires now further characterisation of both components to understand their interactions., 7 pages, 6 figures

We present the first resolved image of the debris disk around the 16+/-8 Myr old star, HD 114082. The observation was made in the H-band using the SPHERE instrument. The star is at a distance of 92+/-6 pc in the Lower Centaurus Crux association. Using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo analysis, we determined that the debris is likely in the form of a dust ring with an inner edge of 27.7+2.8/-3.5 au, position angle -74+0.5/-1.5 deg, and an inclination with respect to the line of sight of 6.7+3.8/-0.4 deg. The disk imaged in scattered light has a surface density declining with radius like ~r^(-4), steeper than expected for grain blowout by radiation pressure. We find only marginal evidence (2 sigma) of eccentricity, and rule out planets more massive than 1.0 Mjup orbiting within 1 au of the ring's inner edge, since such a planet would have disrupted the disk. The disk has roughly the same fractional disk luminosity (Ldisk/L*=3.3x10^(-3)) as HR4796A and Beta Pictoris, however it was not detected by previous instrument facilities most likely because of its small angular size (radius~0.4"), low albedo (~0.2) and low scattering efficiency far from the star due to high scattering anisotropy. With the arrival of extreme adaptive optics systems like SPHERE and GPI, the morphology of smaller, fainter and more distant debris disks are being revealed, providing clues to planet-disk interactions in young protoplanetary systems., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

The near infrared extinction powerlaw index ($\beta$) and its uncertainty is derived from three different techniques based on star counts, colour excess and a combination of them. We have applied these methods to 2MASS data to determine maps of $\beta$ and near infrared extinction of the small cloud IC 1396 W. The combination of star counts and colour excess results in the most reliable method to determine $\beta$. It is found that the use of the correct $\beta$-map to transform colour excess values into extinction is fundamental for column density profile analysis of clouds. We describe how artificial photometric data, based on the model of stellar population synthesis of the Galaxy (Robin et al. 2003), can be used to estimate uncertainties and derive systematic effects of the extinction methods presented here. We find that all colour excess based extinction determination methods are subject to small but systematic offsets, which do not affect the star counting technique. These offsets occur since stars seen through a cloud do not represent the same population as stars in an extinction free control field.

Very Large Array** neutral hydrogen observations of the shell elliptical galaxy NGC 3656 reveal an edge-on, warped minor-axis gaseous disk (M ~ 2 × 109 M⊙) extending 7 kpc. H I is also found outside the optical image, on two complexes to the northeast and northwest that seem to trace one or two tidal tails, or possibly an outer broken H I disk or ring. These complexes link with the outer edges of the inner disk and appear displaced with respect to the two optical tails in the galaxy. The disk kinematics is strongly lopsided, suggesting recent or ongoing accretion. Integral-field optical fiber spectroscopy at the region of the bright southern shell of NGC 3656 has provided a determination of the stellar velocities of the shell. The shell, at 9 kpc from the center, has traces of H I with velocities bracketing the stellar velocities, providing evidence for a dynamical association of H I and stars at the shell. Within the errors the stars have systemic velocity, suggesting a possible phase-wrapping origin for the shell. We probed a region of 40' × 40' (480 kpc × 480 kpc) × 1160 km s-1 down to an H I mass sensitivity (6 σ) of 3 × 107 M⊙ and detect five dwarf galaxies with H I masses ranging from 2 × 108 to 2 × 109 M⊙, all within 180 kpc of NGC 3656 and all within the velocity range (450 km s-1) of the H I of NGC 3656. The dwarfs had been previously cataloged, but none had a known redshift. For the NGC 3656 group to be bound requires a total mass of (3–7.4) × 1012 M⊙, yielding a mass-to-light ratio from 125 to 300. The overall H I picture presented by NGC 3656 supports the hypothesis of a disk-disk merger origin or possibly an ongoing process of multiple mergers with nearby dwarfs.

CARMENES (Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exo-earths with Near-infrared and optical Echelle Spectrographs) is a next-generation instrument for the 3.5m telescope at the Calar Alto Observatory, built by a consortium of eleven Spanish and German institutions. The CARMENES instrument consists of two separate echelle spectrographs covering the wavelength range from 0.55 μm to 1.7 μm at a spectral resolution of R = 82, 000, fed by fibers from the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. Both spectrographs are housed in temperature-stabilized vacuum tanks, to enable a long-term 1 m/s radial velocity precision employing a simultaneous calibration with Th-Ne and U-Ne emission line lamps. CARMENES has been optimized for a search for terrestrial planets in the habitable zones (HZs) of low-mass stars, which may well provide our first chance to study environments capable of supporting the development of life outside the Solar System. With its unique combination of optical and near-infrared ´echelle spectrographs, CARMENES will provide better sensitivity for the detection of low-mass planets than any comparable instrument, and a powerful tool for discriminating between genuine planet detections and false positives caused by stellar activity. The CARMENES survey will target 300 M dwarfs in the 2014 to 2018 time frame.

Intracluster stellar populations are a natural result of tidal interactions in galaxy clusters. Measuring these populations is difficult, but important for understanding the assembly of the most massive galaxies. The Coma cluster is one of the nearest truly massive galaxy clusters, and is host to a correspondingly large system of globular clusters (GCs). We use imaging from the HST/ACS Coma Cluster Survey to present the first definitive detection of a large population of intracluster GCs (IGCs) that fills the Coma cluster core and is not associated with individual galaxies. The GC surface density profile around the central massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 4874, is dominated at large radii by a population of IGCs that extend to the limit of our data (R, 18 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Typos corrected, and fixed glitch in Figure 1

Context. Radial velocity (RV) measurements from near-infrared spectra have become a potentially powerful tool to search for planets around cool stars and sub-stellar objects. As part of a large survey to characterize M-dwarfs using NIRSPEC at Keck II, we obtained spectra of eight late M-dwarfs (spectral types M5.0-M8.0) during two or more observing epochs per target. These spectra were taken with intermediate spectral resolving powers (R \sim 20,000) in the J-band. Aims. We search for relative radial velocity variability in these late M-dwarfs and test the NIRSPEC capability of detecting short period brown dwarf and massive planetary companions around low-mass stars in the J-band (\approx 1.25 micron). Additionally, we reanalyzed the data of the M8-type star vB10 (one of our targets) presented in Zapatero Osorio et al. (2009), which were obtained with the same instrumentation as our data. Methods. [...] Results. For the entire M-dwarf sample, we do not find any evidence of relative RV variations induced by a short period brown dwarf or massive planetary companion. The typical RV precision of the measurements is between 180 and 300 m/s, which is sufficient to detect hot Neptunes around M-dwarfs. Also, we find that the spurious RV shift in Zapatero et al. (2009) of the star VB10 was caused by asymmetries in the instrumental profile between different observing epochs, which were not taken into account in their analysis., Comment: A&A, 7 pages, 5 figures

The Coma cluster was the target of a HST-ACS Treasury program designed for deep imaging in the F475W and F814W passbands. Although our survey was interrupted by the ACS instrument failure in 2007, the partially completed survey still covers ~50% of the core high-density region in Coma. Observations were performed for 25 fields that extend over a wide range of cluster-centric radii (~1.75 Mpc) with a total coverage area of 274 arcmin^2. The majority of the fields are located near the core region of Coma (19/25 pointings) with six additional fields in the south-west region of the cluster. In this paper we present reprocessed images and SExtractor source catalogs for our survey fields, including a detailed description of the methodology used for object detection and photometry, the subtraction of bright galaxies to measure faint underlying objects, and the use of simulations to assess the photometric accuracy and completeness of our catalogs. We also use simulations to perform aperture corrections for the SExtractor Kron magnitudes based only on the measured source flux and half-light radius. We have performed photometry for ~73,000 unique objects; one-half of our detections are brighter than the 10-sigma point-source detection limit at F814W=25.8 mag (AB). The slight majority of objects (60%) are unresolved or only marginally resolved by ACS. We estimate that Coma members are 5-10% of all source detections, which consist of a large population of unresolved objects (primarily GCs but also UCDs) and a wide variety of extended galaxies from a cD galaxy to dwarf LSB galaxies. The red sequence of Coma member galaxies has a constant slope and dispersion across 9 magnitudes (-21, Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJS. A high-resolution version is available at http://archdev.stsci.edu/pub/hlsp/coma/release2/PaperII.pdf

We show how standard tomographic techniques may be applied to study the three dimensional structure of stellar jets. To achieve this, we invert observed emission maps, and determine the physical parameters from the line ratios. For the first time this technique is applied to the HH30 jet, showing that the jet is denser and more fragmented than what can be inferred when deducing the physical parameters directly from the observed emission maps.

Integral field spectroscopy has been obtained for the nuclear regions of 3 large, well-studied, early-type galaxies. From these spectra we have obtained line strength maps for about 20 absorption lines, mostly belonging to the Lick system. An extensive comparison with multi-lenslet spectroscopy shows that accurate kinematic maps can be obtained, and also reproducible line strength maps. Comparison with long-slit spectroscopy also produces good agreement. We show that Mg is enhanced with respect to Fe in the inner disk of one of the three galaxies studied, the Sombrero. [Mg/Fe] there is larger than in the rest of the bulge. The large values of Mg/Fe in the central disk are consistent with the centres of other early-type galaxies, and not with large disks, like the disk of our Galaxy, where [Mg/Fe] is approximately 0. We confirm with this observation a recent result of Worthey (1998) that Mg/Fe is determined by the central kinetic energy, or escape velocity, of the stars, only, and not by the formation time scale of the stars. A stellar population analysis using the models of Vazdekis et al. (1996) shows that our observed H gamma agrees well with what is predicted based on the other lines. Using the line strength of the Ca II IR triplet as an indicator of the abundance of Ca, we find that Ca follows Fe, and not Mg, in these galaxies. This is peculiar, given the fact that Ca is an alpha-element. Finally, by combining the results of this paper with those of Vazdekis et al. (1997) we find that the line strength gradients in the three galaxies are primarily caused by variations in metallicity., 23 pages, Latex, includes mn.sty, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

This work provides an update of the current status of PHASES, which is a project aimed at developing a space-borne telescope to perform absolute flux calibrated spectroscopy of bright stars. PHASES will make it possible to measure micromagnitude photometric variations due to, e.g., exo-planet/moon transits. It is designed to obtain 1% RMS flux calibrated low resolution spectra in the wavelength range 370–960 nm with signal-to-noise ratios >100 for stars with V

M dwarf stars are the dominant stellar component of the Galaxy, and therefore they contain fundamental information about galactic structure and evolution. Furthermore, Mdwarfs were recognized as promising targets for the detection of potentially habitable planets. We present the homogeneous analysis of a sample of Southern early-type M dwarfs in the Solar neighborhood (d

Se presenta un modelo para caracterizar sistemas planetarios. Para sistemas en tránsito, cuya caracterización es nuestra principal motivación científica, el modelo permite obtener estimaciones coherentes de algunos parámetros físicos (masas y radios) y orbitales (inclinación, excentricidad, longitud del semieje mayor, argumento del periastro) a partir de ajustes simultáneos de series temporales de datos, que son generalmente curvas de luz y curvas de velocidad radial. El modelo usado para realizar los ajustes se basa en un modelo de N cuerpos que se integra numéricamente, como alternativa a los modelos analíticos usados comúnmente. Su uso pretende alcanzar la máxima precisión posible en el análisis de sistemas planetarios múltiples en los que existe interacción dinámica apreciable entre dos o más planetas miembros. Hemos validado el modelo usándolo para extraer los parámetros de varios sistemas planetarios conocidos (alrededor de las estrellas huésped HD 209458, HAT-P-14 y WASP-44) y concluimos que el modelo se encuentra en un estado funcional. El modelo admite cierto margen de mejora, como la incorporación de algunos efectos físicos adicionales para un tratamiento más preciso de los datos y de mejoras en el método de integración con el objetivo de alcanzar una mayor eficiencia computacional. Este modelo es útil para el análisis de datos obtenidos con los espectrógrafos de nueva generación como, por ejemplo, CARMENES, cuyo objetivo más ambicioso es la búsqueda de planetas telúricos en la zona habitable de estrellas de baja masa. El modelo también servirá para el desarrollo del proyecto PHASES, que es un telescopio espacial de bajo costo para la obtención de espectros estelares de baja resolución calibrados de forma absoluta.