Dynamical Mass of GJ 802B: a brown dwarf in a triple system

Abstract

We report a dynamical measurement of the mass of the brown dwarf GJ 802B using aperture-masking interferometry and astrometry. In addition, we report the discovery that GJ 802A is itself a close spectroscopic non-eclipsing binary with a 19 hour period. We find the mass of GJ 802B to be $0.063\pm 0.005$M$_\sun$. GJ 802 has kinematics inconsistent with a young star and more consistent with the thick disk population, implying a system age of $\sim$10 GYr. However, model evolutionary tracks for GJ 802B predict system ages of $\sim$2 GYr, suggesting that brown dwarf evolutionary models may be underestimating luminosity for old brown dwarfs.

10 pages, 6 figures, accepted for ApJ

References in corpus (3)

• Evolution of low-mass star and brown dwarf eclipsing binaries
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• An Age Constraint for the Very Low-Mass Stellar/Brown Dwarf Binary 2MASS J03202839-0446358AB