89 New Ultracool Dwarf Co-Moving Companions Identified With The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 Citizen Science Project

TL;DR

This study identifies 89 new ultracool dwarf companions to stars using citizen science data, expanding the known population and providing valuable targets for future atmospheric studies.

Contribution

It reports the discovery of a large, diverse sample of ultracool dwarf companions, significantly increasing known systems and filling gaps between exoplanets and stellar binaries.

Findings

Identified 89 new ultracool dwarf systems.

Increased ultracool dwarf companion population by ~42%.

Tripled the known ultracool dwarf companions with >1000 au separation.

Abstract

We report the identification of 89 new systems containing ultracool dwarf companions to main sequence stars and white dwarfs, using the citizen science project Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 and cross-reference between Gaia and CatWISE2020. Thirty-two of these companions and thirty-three host stars were followed up with spectroscopic observations, with companion spectral types ranging from M7-T9 and host spectral types ranging from G2-M9. These systems exhibit diverse characteristics, from young to old ages, blue to very red spectral morphologies, potential membership to known young moving groups, and evidence of spectral binarity in 9 companions. Twenty of the host stars in our sample show evidence for higher order multiplicity, with an additional 11 host stars being resolved binaries themselves. We compare this sample's characteristics with those of the known stellar binary and exoplanet populations, and find our sample begins to fill in the gap between directly imaged exoplanets and stellary binaries on mass ratio-binding energy plots. With this study, we increase the population of ultracool dwarf companions to FGK stars by $\sim$42\%, and more than triple the known population of ultracool dwarf companions with separations larger than 1,000 au, providing excellent targets for future atmospheric retrievals.