The NIRSPEC Ultracool Dwarf Radial Velocity Survey
Cullen H. Blake, David Charbonneau, and Russel J. White

TL;DR
This infrared Doppler survey of ultracool dwarfs achieved high radial velocity precision, enabling detection of planetary companions and binary systems, and provided insights into their kinematic ages and binary fractions.
Contribution
The study demonstrates the effectiveness of telluric CH4 features for precise radial velocity measurements of ultracool dwarfs and reports the first orbital solutions for specific binary systems.
Findings
Achieved 50 m/s radial velocity precision for M dwarfs
Achieved ~200 m/s precision for L dwarfs
Estimated tight binary fraction of 2.5% in the sample
Abstract
We report the results of an infrared Doppler survey designed to detect brown dwarf and giant planetary companions to a magnitude-limited sample of ultracool dwarfs. Using the NIRSPEC spectrograph on the Keck II telescope, we obtained approximately 600 radial velocity measurements over a period of six years for a sample of 59 late-M and L dwarfs spanning spectral types M8/L0 to L6. A subsample of 46 of our targets have been observed on three or more epochs. We rely on telluric CH4 absorption features in the Earth's atmosphere as a simultaneous wavelength reference and exploit the rich set of CO absorption features found in the K-band spectra of cool stars and brown dwarfs to measure radial velocities and projected rotational velocities. For a bright, slowly rotating M dwarf standard we demonstrate a radial velocity precision of 50 m/s, and for slowly rotating L dwarfs we achieve a…
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