Parallax measurements of cool brown dwarfs^⋆,⋆⋆

¹ Max Planck Institute für Astronomie, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: manjavacas@mpia.de; goldman@mpia.de; henning@mpia.de
² University of Heidelberg, Zentrum für Astronomie, Landessternwarte Königstuhl 12, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
e-mail: sreffert@lsw.uni-heidelberg.de

Received: 17 April 2013
Accepted: 3 October 2013

Abstract

Context. Accurate parallax measurements allow us to determine physical properties of brown dwarfs and help us constrain evolutionary and atmospheric models, break age-mass degeneracy, and reveal unresolved binaries.

Aims. We measured absolute trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions of six cool brown dwarfs using background galaxies to establish an absolute reference frame. We derive the absolute J-band magnitude. The six T brown dwarfs in our sample have spectral types between T2.5 and T8 and magnitudes between 13.9 and 18.0 in the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) with photometric distances below 25 pc.

Methods. The observations were taken in the J-band with the Omega-2000 camera on the 3.5 m telescope at Calar Alto during a time period of 27 months between March 2011 and June 2013. The number of epochs varied between 11 and 12 depending on the object. The reduction of the astrometric measurements was carried out with respect to the field stars. The relative parallax and proper motions were transformed into absolute measurements using the background galaxies in our fields.

Results. We obtained absolute parallaxes for our six brown dwarfs with a precision between 3 and 6 mas. We compared our results in a color–magnitude diagram with other brown dwarfs with determined parallax and with the BT-Settl 2012 atmospheric models. For four of the six targets, we found a good agreement in luminosity with objects of similar spectral types. We obtained an improved accuracy in the parallaxes and proper motions in comparison to previous works. The object 2MASS J11061197+2754225 is more than 1 mag overluminous in all bands, which point to binarity or high order multiplicity.