Searching for GEMS: Discovery and Characterization of Two Brown Dwarfs Around M Dwarfs

Abstract

Copyright and License

© 2025. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.

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Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and improvements to the manuscript.

Based on observations obtained with the Hobby–Eberly Telescope (HET), which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitaet Muenchen, and Georg-August Universitaet Goettingen. The HET is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly.

These results are based on observations obtained with the Habitable-zone Planet Finder Spectrograph on the HET. The HPF team acknowledges support from NSF grants AST-1006676, AST-1126413, AST-1310885, AST-1517592, AST-1310875, ATI 2009889, ATI-2009982, AST-2108512, and the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NNA09DA76A) in the pursuit of precision radial velocities in the NIR. The HPF team also acknowledges support from the Heising-Simons Foundation via grant 2017-0494.

Some of the observations in this paper made use of the NN-EXPLORE Exoplanet and Stellar Speckle Imager (NESSI). NESSI was funded by the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program and the NASA Ames Research Center. NESSI was built at the Ames Research Center by Steve B. Howell, Nic Scott, Elliott P. Horch, and Emmett Quigley.

This research has made use of the NASA Exoplanet Archive, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under the Exoplanet Exploration Program.

The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen's University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, the Space Telescope Science Institute, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration under grant No. NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, the National Science Foundation grant No. AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Data presented herein were obtained at the WIYN Observatory from telescope time allocated to NN-EXPLORE through the scientific partnership of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory.

This work has made use of data from the European Space Agency (ESA) mission Gaia (https://www.cosmos.esa.int/gaia), processed by the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC; https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dpac/consortium). Funding for the DPAC has been provided by national institutions, in particular the institutions participating in the Gaia Multilateral Agreement.

C.I.C. acknowledges support by NASA Headquarters through an appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program at the Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by ORAU through a contract with NASA.

Supported by the National Science Foundation under grants No. AST-1440341 and AST-2034437 and a collaboration including current partners Caltech, IPAC, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, University of California, Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, University of Warwick, Ruhr University, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Drexel University. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW.

This work funded by Wyoming NASA Space Grant Consortium, NASA grant #80NSSC20M0113.

This work funded by the Wyoming Research Scholars Program at the University of Wyoming.

We thank Jason Eastman and Noah Vowell for helpful conversations regarding the use of EXOFASTv2.

We thank Maxwell Moe for helpful conversations regarding formation mechanisms and biases.

We thank Brock A. Parker for helpful conversations regarding data reduction and the usage of several software.

Facilities

HET - McDonald Observatory's Hobby-Eberly Telescope, RBO - , WIYN - Wisconsin-Indiana-Yale-NOAO Telescope, TESS - , Gaia - , ExoFOP - , FWLO:2MASS - , CTIO:2MASS, AAVSO - , Sloan - Sloan Digital Sky Survey Telescope, PS1 - Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System Telescope #1 (Pan-STARRS), WISE - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, NESSI - , PO:1.2m - Palomar Observatory's 1.2 meter Samuel Oschin Telescope, ASAS-SN. -

Software References

EXOFASTv2 (J. Eastman et al. 2013), barycorrpy (S. Kanodia & J. Wright 2018), HPF-SpecMatch (G. Stefansson et al. 2020), TESS-Gaia Light-Curve (T. Han & T. D. Brandt 2023), PHOEBE2 v2.4 (A. Prša et al. 2016), AstroImageJ (K. A. Collins et al. 2017), Matplotlib (J. D. Hunter 2007), pandas v1.5.3 (W. McKinney 2010; The pandas development team 2020), numpy (C. R. Harris et al. 2020), Kiman Radius-Estimation v1.0.0 (R. Kiman et al. 2024a).

Additional Information

Based on observations obtained with the Hobby–Eberly Telescope (HET), which is a joint project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State University, Ludwig-Maximillians- Universitaet Muenchen, and Georg-August Universitaet Gottingen. The HET is named in honor of its principal benefactors, William P. Hobby and Robert E. Eberly.