Letter to the Editor

Polarised radio pulsations from a new T-dwarf binary

¹ ASTRON, Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, Oude Hoogeveensedijk 4, 7991 PD Dwingeloo, The Netherlands
e-mail: vedantham@astron.nl
² Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, PO Box 72 97200 AB Groningen, The Netherlands
³ Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJ, UK
⁴ The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Astronomy, 2515 Speedway, C1400, Austin, TX 78712, USA
⁵ Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, PO Box 9513 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
⁶ Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii, 2680, Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA
⁷ LESIA, CNRS – Observatoire de Paris, PSL, 92190 Meudon, France

Received: 13 September 2022
Accepted: 5 December 2022

Abstract

Brown dwarfs display Jupiter-like auroral phenomena such as magnetospheric Hα emission and coherent radio emission. Coherent radio emission is a probe of magnetospheric acceleration mechanisms and it provides a direct measurement of the magnetic field strength at the emitter’s location, both of which are difficult to access by other means. Observations of the coldest brown dwarfs (spectral types T and Y) are particularly interesting as their magnetospheric phenomena may be very similar to those in gas-giant exoplanets. Here we present 144 MHz radio and infrared adaptive optics observations of the brown dwarf WISEP J101905.63+652954.2 made using the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) and Keck telescopes, respectively. The radio data show pulsed, highly circularly polarised emission which yields a rotation rate of 0.32 ± 0.03 h⁻¹. The infrared imaging reveals the source to be a binary with a projected separation of 423.0 ± 1.6 mas between components of spectral type T5.5 ± 0.5 and T7.0 ± 0.5. With a simple ‘toy model’, we show that the radio emission can, in principle, be powered by the interaction between the two dwarfs with a mass-loss rate of at least 25 times the Jovian value. WISEP J101905.63+652954.2 is interesting because it is the first pulsed methane dwarf detected in a low radio-frequency search. Unlike previous gigahertz-frequency searches that were only sensitive to objects with kiloGauss fields, our low-frequency search is sensitive to surface magnetic fields of ≈50 G and above which might reveal the coldest radio-loud objects down to planetary mass scales.