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Q.M. Konopacky (UCLA), B.A. Macintosh (IGPP at LLNL), A.M. Ghez, B. Zuckerman, D. Kaisler, I. Song (UCLA)
Using the Shane 3 meter telescope at Lick Observatory, we surveyed 102 nearby young stars with the near-infrared adaptive optics system. Young stars were targetted in order to increase the sensitivity to low-mass companions. Of these 102 stars, 44 had at least one other source in the field of view with separations ranging from 0.4" to 30". Follow-up imaging or photometric analysis revealed that many of these companions were in fact background objects; however, a significant fraction, estimated now at around 50%, did turn out to be real, with a few brown dwarf candidates. This survey revealed that our instrumentation was sensitive to objects as small as a few Jupiter masses as close to the primary as a few tenths of an arcsecond out to tens of arcseconds.
This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics, managed by the University of California at Santa Cruz under cooperative agreement No. AST - 9876783.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: qmkonopacky@yahoo.com
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.