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Identification of a Companion for a White Dwarf — an Ultra-wide Binary Pair?

Presentation #414.04 in the session “Brown Dwarfs 2”.

Published onJan 11, 2021
Identification of a Companion for a White Dwarf — an Ultra-wide Binary Pair?

The Backyard Worlds’ Project: Planet 9 set-up by Dr Marc Kuchner in 2018 principal aims were to discover Planet 9, presumed to exist at the fringes of our Solar System and to search for new brown dwarfs in the Solar System’s backyard. Since the inception of the project, it has evolved into many different sub-areas. One of which includes the study of common proper motion companions in the neighbourhood of the Solar System. The development and use of professional software accessible to citizen scientists have resulted in the identification of a brown dwarf companion to a known white dwarf, discovered as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Release 12 (Kepler et al., 2015). This pair was identified by the power of Citizen Science by working through lists of brown-dwarf candidates and checking available catalogues for co-moving objects. The white dwarf and brown dwarf were identified having very similar proper motions and Gaia parallax indicating they are likely associated. Currently, five such pairs are published to date. The spectroscopic characteristics of the pair are discussed.

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