On the existence of brown dwarfs more massive than the hydrogen burning limit

Abstract

Almost by definition brown dwarfs are objects with masses below the hydrogen burning limit, around $0.07M_{\odot }$. Below this mass, objects never reach a steady state where they can fuse hydrogen. Here we demonstrate, in contrast to this traditional view, that brown dwarfs with masses greater than the hydrogen burning limit may in principle exist in the universe. These objects, which we term "overmassive brown dwarfs" form a continuous sequence with traditional brown dwarfs in any property (mass, effective temperature, radius, luminosity). To form an overmassive brown dwarf, mass must be added sufficiently slowly to a sufficiently old traditional brown dwarf below the hydrogen burning limit. We identify mass transfer in binary brown dwarf systems via Roche lobe overflow driven by gravitational waves to be the most plausible mechanism to produce the bulk of the putative overmassive brown dwarf population.

Resubmitted to AAS Journals after revisions

References in corpus (10)

• Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA)
• New evolutionary models for pre-main sequence and main sequence low-mass stars down to the hydrogen-burning limit
• Limits on the Macho Content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds
• The Evolution of L and T Dwarfs in Color-Magnitude Diagrams
• The primordial deuterium abundance of the most metal-poor damped Lyman-alpha system
• Constraining the multiplicity statistics of the coolest brown dwarfs: binary fraction continues to decrease with spectral type
• Binary frequency of very young brown dwarfs at separations smaller than 3 AU
• Stellar loci II. a model-free estimate of the binary fraction for field FGK stars
• Analytic Models of Brown Dwarfs and The Substellar Mass Limit
• Supervised Learning Detection of Sixty Non-Transiting Hot Jupiter Candidates

Cited by in corpus (14)

• The origin of free-floating planets
• Brown Dwarf Atmospheres as the Potentially Most Detectable and Abundant Sites for Life
• A brown dwarf donor and an optically thin accretion disc with a complex stream impact region in the period-bouncer candidate BW Sculptoris
• A Joint SRG/eROSITA + ZTF Search: Discovery of a 97-min Period Eclipsing Cataclysmic Variable with Evidence of a Brown Dwarf Secondary
• Prospects for Life on Temperate Planets Around Brown Dwarfs
• Quantum effects on plasma screening for thermonuclear reactions in laser-generated plasmas
• Stable Hydrogen burning limits in rapidly rotating very low mass objects
• An Asymmetric Eclipse Seen Towards the Pre-Main Sequence Binary System V928 Tau
• A Novel Survey for Young Substellar Objects with the W band Filter.V. IC 348 and Barnard 5 in the Perseus Cloud
• K2 Discovery of a Circumsecondary Disk Transiting EPIC 220208795
• An irradiated-Jupiter analogue hotter than the Sun
• Where to find over-massive brown dwarfs: new benchmark systems for binary evolution
• A numerical modeling of rotating substellar objects up to mass-shedding limits
• OGLE-2017-BLG-1038: A Possible Brown-dwarf Binary Revealed by Spitzer Microlensing Parallax