paper

A brown dwarf mass donor in an accreting binary

arXiv:astro-ph/0612220 · doi:10.1126/science.1133333

Abstract

A long standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from sub-stellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined with the challenge of detecting the donor against the light from accretion means that no donor star to date has a measured mass below the hydrogen burning limit. Here we apply a technique which allows us to reliably measure the mass of the unseen donor star in eclipsing systems. We are able to identify a brown dwarf donor star, with a mass of 0.052+/-0.002 Msun. The relatively high mass of the donor star for its orbital period suggests that current evolutionary models may underestimate the radii of brown dwarfs.

10 pages, 2 figures. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in SCIENCE, Vol #5805, 8-12-06

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