Near-Infrared Imaging Survey of Faint Companions around Young Dwarfs in the Pleiades Cluster

Abstract

We conducted a near-infrared imaging survey of 11 young dwarfs in the Pleiades cluster using the Subaru Telescope and the near-infrared coronagraph imager. We found 10 faint point sources, with magnitudes as faint as 20 mag in the K-band, around 7 dwarfs. Comparison with Spitzer archive images revealed that a pair of the faint sources around V 1171 Tau are very red in the infrared wavelengths, indicative of very low-mass young stellar objects. However, the results of our follow-up proper motion measurements implied that the central star and the faint sources do not share common proper motions, suggesting that they are not physically associated.