Letter to the Editor

A giant planet candidate near a young brown dwarf^*

Direct VLT/NACO observations using IR wavefront sensing

¹ European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile e-mail: gchauvin@eso.org
² Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Observatoire de Grenoble, 414 rue de la piscine, Saint-Martin d'Hères, France
³ Department of Physics & Astronomy and Center for Astrobiology, University of California, Los Angeles, 8371 Math Science Building, Box 951562, CA 90095-1562, USA
⁴ Laboratoire d'Astrophysique, Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées, Tarbes, France
⁵ Spitzer Science Center, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, MS 220-6, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA

Received: 22 July 2004
Accepted: 12 August 2004

Abstract

We present deep VLT/NACO infrared imaging and spectroscopic observations of the brown dwarf 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254, obtained during our on-going adaptive optics survey of southern young, nearby associations. This ~25  brown dwarf, located ~70 pc from Earth, has been recently identified as a member of the TW Hydrae Association (age ~ 8 Myr). Using adaptive optics infrared wavefront sensing to acquire sharp images of its circumstellar environment, we discovered a very faint and very red object at a close separation of ~780 mas (~55 AU). Photometry in the H, and bands and upper limit in J-band are compatible with a spectral type L5-L9.5. Near-infrared spectroscopy is consistent with this spectral type estimate. Different evolutionary models predict an object within the planetary regime with a mass of and an effective temperature of  K.