Low Mass Companions of White Dwarf Stars

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One of the oldest questions in modern astronomy is: what is the percentage of stars accompanied by planetary systems? The bridge between low-mass stars and giant planets, such as Jupiter, is a class of objects called "brown dwarfs." Brown dwarfs shine at infrared (IR) wavelengths from energy released by slow gravi- tational contraction. During the next three years the Principal Investigator (PI) and his Co-Investigator will continue a long-term and previously NSF-supported survey to search for brown dwarfs. Because brown dwarfs are not too much fainter than white dwarfs, they will obtain electronic images of several hundred white dwarfs with an IR camera and estimate the number of brown dwarfs among them. They will also continue to monitor previously discovered brown-dwarf/white-dwarf systems to determine their orbital charac- teristics and ultimately the masses of these objects. It is expected that this and related studies will contribute significantly to our understanding of the formation of stars and planets, and in particular whether all these objects are products of the same formation process.