Shaping the Brown Dwarf Desert: Predicting the Primordial Brown Dwarf Binary Distributions from Turbulent Fragmentation

Abstract

The formation of brown dwarfs (BDs) poses a key challenge to star formation theory. The observed dearth of nearby ($\le 5$ AU) brown dwarf companions to solar-mass stars, known as the brown dwarf desert, as well as the tendency for low-mass binary systems to be more tightly-bound than stellar binaries, have been cited as evidence for distinct formation mechanisms for brown dwarfs and stars. In this paper, we explore the implications of the minimal hypothesis that brown dwarfs in binary systems originate via the same fundamental fragmentation mechanism as stars, within isolated, turbulent giant molecular cloud cores. We demonstrate analytically that the scaling of specific angular momentum with turbulent core mass naturally gives rise to the brown dwarf desert, as well as wide brown-dwarf binary systems. Further, we show that the turbulent core fragmentation model also naturally predicts that very low-mass (VLM) binary and BD/BD systems are more tightly-bound than stellar systems. In addition, in order to capture the stochastic variation intrinsic to turbulence, we generate $10^4$ model turbulent cores with synthetic turbulent velocity fields to show that the turbulent fragmentation model accommodates a small fraction of binary brown dwarfs with wide separations, similar to observations. Indeed, the picture which emerges from the turbulent fragmentation model is that a single fragmentation mechanism may largely shape both stellar and brown dwarf binary distributions during formation.

This version (34 pages, 3 figures, 1 table) was submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. A final version was published in the Astrophysical Journal with minor changes and reformatting on 30 April 2013. The below journal reference and DOI refer to the published version of this article

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