A Substellar Companion to the Dusty Pleiades Star HD 23514

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a substellar companion, likely a brown dwarf, orbiting the dusty Pleiades star HD 23514, providing insights into substellar companions in dusty stellar environments.

Contribution

First detection of a brown dwarf companion to a Pleiades star, highlighting the rarity and significance of such systems in dusty environments.

Findings

Discovered a 0.06 M$_\odot$ brown dwarf companion at ~360 AU.

The host star is one of the dustiest main-sequence stars known.

This system is unique for studying substellar companions in dusty environments.

Abstract

With adaptive optics imaging at Keck observatory, we have discovered a substellar companion to the F6 Pleiades star HD 23514, one of the dustiest main-sequence stars known to date (L_{IR}/L_{*}~2%). This is one of the first brown dwarfs discovered as a companion to a star in the Pleiades. The 0.06 M$_\odot$ late-M secondary has a projected separation of ~360 AU. The scarcity of substellar companions to stellar primaries in the Pleiades combined with the extremely dusty environment make this a unique system to study.