Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2602.10333

Searching for radio emission from stellar wind-magnetosphere interaction or co-rotation breakdown in brown dwarfs

Rebeca Pirvu Malanda·Simranpreet Kaur·Daniele Viganò·Òscar Morata·Josep Miquel Girart·Álvaro Sánchez Monge·Devojyoti Kansabanik·Mario Damasso·Mayank Narang·Gemma Busquet·Juan Carlos Morales·Fabio Del Sordo·Kaustubh Hakim·Manoj Purvankara
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

With the improvements in radio interferometry sensitivity, the quest for coherent radio emission from exoplanets and ultra-cool dwarfs, which is indicative of their magnetic fields, has gained significant momentum in recent years. We investigated the relatively unexplored possibility of radio emission from wide-orbit brown dwarf companions, which may radiate through rapid rotation, as in isolated ultra-cool dwarfs, or via interactions between their extended magnetospheres and the host star's wind. We analysed $\sim 60$ hours of Upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope and Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array data for a set of well-characterized systems previously unobserved at 0.3-2 GHz. The targets include companions orbiting the G-type stars HD 26161 and BD-004475, the K-type HD 153557A and $ν$ Oph, and the M dwarfs GJ 3626 and 2MJ01225093-2439505. No detections were obtained with 3$σ$ upper limits down to $\sim 25\,μ$Jy/beam in Stokes V in the best cases. The light-curve analysis also revealed no evidence of short ($\gtrsim$ minutes), intense ($\gtrsim$ mJy) radio bursts. The upper limits provide tentative constraints on model parameters. However, the effects of model uncertainties, limited observational coverage, and intrinsic variability or beaming of the emission must be considered. The improvement in sensitivity of the next-generation radio interferometers will likely allow to go below the expected flux range over a much larger range of free parameters.

Explore related subjects

astro-ph.SRastro-ph.EP

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Rebeca Pirvu Malanda, Simranpreet Kaur, Daniele Viganò, Òscar Morata, Josep Miquel Girart, Álvaro Sánchez Monge, Devojyoti Kansabanik, Mario Damasso, Mayank Narang, Gemma Busquet, Juan Carlos Morales, Fabio Del Sordo, Kaustubh Hakim, Manoj Purvankara. 2026-02-10. Searching for radio emission from stellar wind-magnetosphere interaction or co-rotation breakdown in brown dwarfs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10333

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

The Payne Zero Project I: Stellar Spectra from Physical Models in Seconds

Modern stellar surveys measure millions of spectra, yet one self-consistent atmosphere and spectrum can require tens of minutes. This cost has motivated grids, spectral emulators, and data-driven models. We present Payne Zero, which reorganizes one-dimensional LTE Kurucz calculations for GPU-native synthesis and multicore atmosphere iteration, and validate it against the original Fortran programs. A 300-1000 nm solar spectrum sampled at a grid resolution of R = 300,000 takes about 14 s on an NVIDIA H100 GPU, while the APOGEE 1500-1700 nm interval takes about 1 s. Physical atmosphere iterations take 2-5 s on 16 AMD CPU threads, and learned initializers reduce the iterations required for convergence. Final spectra remain in practical parity across the tested dwarf and giant regimes. These speeds place direct synthesis inside an optimizer without a label-to-flux spectral emulator. We demonstrate direct many-element fitting of reduced APOGEE spectra and recover multi-element abundance trends broadly consistent with the survey catalog. GPU-resident velocity shifts, broadening, line-spread-function convolution, and detector sampling add negligible cost relative to synthesis. The direct-synthesis search takes less than one minute per star on an H100, while atmosphere verification runs independently on multicore CPUs. The same computational graph calibrates more than 100,000 oscillator-strength and damping corrections jointly against the Sun and Arcturus in about one minute on an H100. Payne Zero therefore brings direct physical fitting and atomic-data calibration to survey scale. The code is available at https://github.com/tingyuansen/payne-zero.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2026

Host-star metallicities and kinematics of directly imaged brown-dwarf companions

Brown dwarfs are common as free-floating objects but rare as close companions to Sun-like stars, a disparity known as the "brown-dwarf desert". Host-star metallicity can constrain whether these companions form mainly through metal-sensitive core accretion or through less metal-dependent disc or cloud fragmentation. We extend our homogeneous spectroscopic analysis of directly imaged planet hosts into the brown-dwarf regime and compare their metallicities with those of planet hosts and close-in brown-dwarf hosts. We compiled 54 unique directly imaged brown-dwarf systems selected over an inclusive 13-80 M_Jup interval and projected separations from about 5 au to several thousand au. Objects near the model-dependent 70-75 M_Jup hydrogen-burning boundary may instead be very-low-mass stars. For 31 hosts with archival high-resolution spectra, we derived atmospheric parameters and metallicities using Bayesian spectral synthesis. Literature companion masses and projected separations are heterogeneous and are used only for demographic context. Galactic velocities were calculated for 46 hosts solely to characterise the youth-biased imaging sample. The host stars have a broadly solar metallicity distribution, with a median [Fe/H] of +0.06 dex and a median absolute deviation of 0.11 dex, and show no strong metal-rich bias. No statistically significant metallicity difference is detected between the lower- and higher-mass directly imaged subsamples. The hosts are kinematically cold, as expected from the youth-biased selection of direct-imaging surveys. The absence of a strong metal-rich bias suggests that classical core accretion does not dominate the wide-orbit brown-dwarf population. Disc instability and cloud fragmentation remain plausible, but the current sample and heterogeneous companion properties do not permit object-by-object discrimination between these channels.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2026

Stability Analysis of the Proton Hammerhead Distribution Observed by Parker Solar Probe: Linear Theory and Fully Kinetic Simulations under Idealised Conditions

The non-adiabatic heating of the slow Solar Wind (SW) remains an open problem, with wave--particle interactions as a primary candidate mechanism. Novel in situ Parker Solar Probe (PSP) observations reveal strongly perpendicular anisotropic velocity distribution functions (VDFs), called "hammerhead", correlated with intense wave activity. These VDFs are systematically measured at the Heliospheric Current Sheet (HCS), making the hammerhead an important kinetic signature of the slow SW. In this work, we employ a fully kinetic particle-in-cell approach, complemented by a linear Vlasov solver to cross-validate the simulation results, to investigate the stability of these VDFs, the timescales over which they evolve, and their interaction with plasma waves. Our main findings indicate that the hammerhead distribution is primarily susceptible to drift-type instabilities, while energy is nonlinearly transferred back to the plasma through a combination of Landau and cyclotron resonances, resulting in net heating in the parallel direction, preferentially energizing the beam proton population. Crucially, these nonlinear interactions do not drastically alter the morphology of the distribution. This suggests the possibility that the hammerhead may be generated locally within the HCS in the inner heliosphere and subsequently advected outward, where it is eventually measured by PSP. This work lays the ground for future investigations into the kinetic physics of the HCS.

astro-ph.SR↗