Orbital motion of the young brown dwarf companion TWA 5 B

TL;DR

This study detects and characterizes the orbital motion of the brown dwarf TWA 5 B around its primary star TWA 5 A using high-resolution images over ten years, revealing an eccentric orbit and potential for mass measurement.

Contribution

First direct detection of orbital motion in the TWA 5 A+B system, providing insights into the orbit's eccentricity and potential for mass determination through residual analysis.

Findings

Detected orbital motion with a decrease in separation and position angle.

Estimated orbit eccentricity around 0.45.

Identified residuals indicating possible inner binary wobble.

Abstract

With more adaptive optics images available, we aim at detecting orbital motion for the first time in the system TWA 5 A+B. We measured separation and position angle between TWA 5 A and B in each high-resolution image available and followed their change in time, because B should orbit around A. The astrometric measurement precision is about one milli arc sec. With ten year difference in epoch, we can clearly detect orbital motion of B around A, a decrease in separation by ~ 0.0054 arc sec per year and a decrease in position angle by ~ 0.26 degrees per year. TWA 5 B is a brown dwarf with ~ 25 Jupiter masses (Neuh\"auser et al. 2000), but having large error bars (4 to 145 Jupiter masses, Neuh\"auser et al. 2009). Given its large projected separation from the primary star, ~ 86 AU, and its young age ~ 10 Myrs), it has probably formed star-like, and would then be a brown dwarf companion. Given the relatively large changes in separation and position angle between TWA 5 A and B, we can conclude that they orbit around each other on an eccentric orbit. Some evidence is found for a curvature in the orbital motion of B around A - most consistent with an elliptic (e=0.45) orbit. Residuals around the best-fit ellipse are detected and show a small-amplitude (~ 18 mas) periodic sinusoid with ~ 5.7 yr period, i.e., fully consistent with the orbit of the inner close pair TWA 5 Aa+b. Measuring these residuals caused by the photocenter wobble - even in unresolved images - can yield the total mass of the inner pair, so can test theoretical pre-main sequence models.