Nonino, Mario and Glazebrook, Karl and Burgasser, Adam J. and Polenta, Gianluca and Morishita, Takahiro and Lepinzan, Marius and Castellano, Marco and Fontana, Adriano and Merlin, Emiliano and Bonchi, Andrea and Paris, Diego and Treu, Tommaso and Vulcani, Benedetta and Wang, Xin and Santini, Paola and Vanzella, Eros and Nanayakkara, Themiya and Mercurio, Amata and Rosati, Piero and Grillo, Claudio and Bradac, Marusa (2023) Early Results from GLASS-JWST. XIII. A Faint, Distant, and Cold Brown Dwarf. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 942 (2). Art. No. L29. ISSN 2041-8205. doi:10.3847/2041-8213/ac8e5f. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20230209-988069100.8
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Abstract
We present the serendipitous discovery of a late T-type brown dwarf candidate in JWST NIRCam observations of the Early Release Science Abell 2744 parallel field. The discovery was enabled by the sensitivity of JWST at 4 μm wavelengths and the panchromatic 0.9–4.5 μm coverage of the spectral energy distribution. The unresolved point source has magnitudes F115W = 27.95 ± 0.15 and F444W = 25.84 ± 0.01 (AB), and its F115W−F444W and F356W−F444W colors match those expected for other known T dwarfs. We can exclude it as a reddened background star, high redshift quasar, or a very high redshift galaxy. Comparison with stellar atmospheric models indicates a temperature of T_(eff) ≈ 650 K and surface gravity log g ≈ 5.25, implying a mass of 0.03 M_⊙ and age of 5 Gyr. We estimate the distance of this candidate to be 570–720 pc in a direction perpendicular to the Galactic plane, making it a likely thick disk or halo brown dwarf. These observations underscore the power of JWST to probe the very low-mass end of the substellar mass function in the Galactic thick disk and halo.
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Additional Information: | Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. This work is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. The data were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-03127 for JWST. These observations are associated with program JWST-ERS-1324. We acknowledge financial support from NASA through grant JWST-ERS-1324. K.G. and T.N. acknowledge support from Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship FL180100060. We acknowledge financial support through grants PRIN-MIUR 2017WSCC32, PRIN-MIUR 2020SKSTHZ, and INAF-Mainstreams 1.05.01.86.20. M.B. acknowledges support by the Slovenian national research agency ARRS through grant N1-0238. Facilities: JWST (NIRCam imaging). Software: gsf (Morishita et al. 2019), SPLAT (Burgasser 2017), ds9 (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory 2000), R (R Core Team 2020). | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Group: | Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Issue or Number: | 2 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
DOI: | 10.3847/2041-8213/ac8e5f | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Record Number: | CaltechAUTHORS:20230209-988069100.8 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Persistent URL: | https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20230209-988069100.8 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Usage Policy: | No commercial reproduction, distribution, display or performance rights in this work are provided. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ID Code: | 119174 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Collection: | CaltechAUTHORS | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Deposited By: | Research Services Depository | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Deposited On: | 15 Mar 2023 16:52 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Last Modified: | 15 Mar 2023 16:52 |
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