Weather on the nearest brown dwarfs: Resolved simultaneous multi-wavelength variability monitoring of wise J104915.57-531906.1AB

Beth A. Biller, Ian J M Crossfield, Luigi Mancini, Simona Ciceri, John Southworth, Taisiya G. Kopytova, Mickaël Bonnefoy, Niall R. Deacon, Joshua E. Schlieder, Esther Buenzli, Wolfgang Brandner, France Allard, Derek Homeier, Bernd Freytag, Coryn A L Bailer-Jones, Jochen Greiner, Thomas Henning, Bertrand Goldman

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    54 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We present two epochs of MPG/ESO 2.2 m GROND simultaneous six-band (r′i′z′ JHK) photometric monitoring of the closest known L/T transition brown dwarf binary WISE J104915.57-531906.1AB. We report here the first resolved variability monitoring of both the T0.5 and L7.5 components. We obtained 4 hr of focused observations on the night of 2013 April 22 (UT), as well as 4 hr of defocused (unresolved) observations on the night of 2013 April 16 (UT). We note a number of robust trends in our light curves. The r′ and i′ light curves appear to be anti-correlated with z′ and H for the T0.5 component and in the unresolved light curve. In the defocused dataset, J appears correlated with z′ and H and anti-correlated with r′ and i′, while in the focused dataset we measure no variability for J at the level of our photometric precision, likely due to evolving weather phenomena. In our focused T0.5 component light curve, the K band light curve displays a significant phase offset relative to both H and z′. We argue that the measured phase offsets are correlated with atmospheric pressure probed at each band, as estimated from one-dimensional atmospheric models. We also report low-amplitude variability in i′ and z′ intrinsic to the L7.5 component.
    Original languageEnglish
    Article numberL10
    JournalAstrophysical Journal Letters
    Volume778
    Issue number1
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 6 Nov 2013

    Keywords

    • brown dwarfs
    • stars: low-mass

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