Letters to the Editor

A companion candidate in the gap of the T Chamaeleontis transitional disk^⋆

¹ Centro de Astrobiología (INTA-CSIC), ESAC Campus, PO Box 78, 28691 Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain
e-mail: nhuelamo@cab.inta-csic.es
² Observatoire de Paris, LESIA/CNRS UMR, 5 place Jules Janssen, 92195 Meudon, France
³ Sydney Institute for Astronomy, School of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
⁴ Hubble Fellow, University of Hawaii-IfA, 2680 Woodlawn Dr, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
⁵ Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Grenoble, CNRS, Université Joseph Fourier, UMR 5571, BP 53, 38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France

Received: 23 December 2010
Accepted: 14 February 2011

Abstract

Context. T Cha is a young star surrounded by a cold disk. The presence of a gap within its disk, inferred from fitting to the spectral energy distribution, has suggested on-going planetary formation.

Aims. The aim of this work is to look for very low-mass companions within the disk gap of T Cha.

Methods. We observed T Cha in L′ and K_s with NAOS-CONICA, the adaptive optics system at the VLT, using sparse aperture masking.

Results. We detected a source in the L′ data at a separation of 62 ± 7 mas, position angle of ~78 ± 1 degrees, and a contrast of ΔL′ = 5.1 ± 0.2 mag. The object is not detected in the K_s band data, which show a 3-σ contrast limit of 5.2 mag at the position of the detected L′ source. For a distance of 108 pc, the detected companion candidate is located at 6.7 AU from the primary, well within the disk gap. If T Cha and the companion candidate are bound, the comparison of the L′ and K_s photometry with evolutionary tracks shows that the photometry is inconsistent with any unextincted photosphere at the age and distance of T Cha. The detected object shows a very red K_s − L′ color, for which a possible explanation would be a significant amount of dust around it. This would imply that the companion candidate is young, which would strengthen the case for a physical companion, and moreover that the object would be in the substellar regime, according to the K_s upper limit. Another exciting possibility would be that this companion is a recently formed planet within the disk. Additional observations are mandatory to confirm that the object is bound and to properly characterize it.