Mapping the Shores of the Brown Dwarf Desert III: Young Moving Groups

Abstract

We present the results of an aperture masking interferometry survey for substellar companions around 67 members of the young (~8-200Myr) nearby (~5-86pc) AB Doradus, Beta Pictoris, Hercules-Lyra, TW Hya, and Tucana-Horologium stellar associations. Observations were made at near infrared wavelengths between 1.2-3.8 microns using the adaptive optics facilities of the Keck II, VLT UT4, and Palomar Hale Telescopes. Typical contrast ratios of ~100-200 were achieved at angular separations between ~40-320mas, with our survey being 100% complete for companions with masses below 0.25\msolar across this range. We report the discovery of a $0.52 \pm 0.09$\msolar companion to HIP14807, as well as the detections and orbits of previously known stellar companions to HD16760, HD113449, and HD160934. We show that the companion to HD16760 is in a face-on orbit, resulting in an upward revision of its mass from $M_2 \sin i \sim 14$\mjupiter to $M_2 = 0.28 \pm 0.04$\msolar. No substellar companions were detected around any of our sample members, despite our ability to detect companions with masses below 80\mjupiter for 50 of our targets: of these, our sensitivity extended down to 40\mjupiter around 30 targets, with a subset of 22 subject to the still more stringent limit of 20\mjupiter. A statistical analysis of our non-detection of substellar companions allows us to place constraints on their frequency around ~0.2-1.5\msolar stars. In particular, considering companion mass distributions that have been proposed in the literature, we obtain an upper limit estimate of ~9-11% for the frequency of 20-80\mjupiter companions between 3-30AU at 95% confidence, assuming that their semimajor axes are distributed according to $d\mathcal{N}/da \propto a^{-1}$ in this range.