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J. L. Hinz, D. W. McCarthy, Jr. (Univ. of Arizona), D. A. Simons (Gemini), T. J. Henry (Georgia State), J. D. Kirkpatrick (IPAC), P. C. McGuire (Univ. of Bielefeld)
We present results from a wide-field proper motion search for stellar and brown dwarf companions to M dwarfs within 8 pc. This survey directly addresses the question of whether or not the brown dwarf "desert" extends to wider separations, noting that wider systems seem to favor small mass ratio systems. First epoch images were obtained by Simons, Henry, and Kirkpatrick in 1992 in a color based search for brown dwarfs around 66 M primaries. Second epoch J-band images of the same fields were obtained at the Steward Observatory 2.3 m between April 1998 and December 2000 with the PISCES camera. The survey is sensitive to proper motion companions within a 4 arcmin radius of the primary with masses down to approximately 0.03 solar masses based on an assumed age of 10 Gyr. We compare the second epoch images with their matching first epoch images using an IRAF subtraction script originally designed to identify supernovae in nearby galaxies.