HD3651B: the first directly imaged brown dwarf companion of an exoplanet host star

Abstract

In the course of our ongoing multiplicity study of exoplanet host stars we detected a faint companion located at ~43arcsec (480AU physical projected separation) north-west of its primary -- the exoplanet host star HD3651 at 11pc. The companion, HD3651B, clearly shares the proper motion of the exoplanet host star in our four images, obtained with ESO/NTT and UKIRT, spanning three years in epoch difference. The magnitude of the companion is H=16.75+-0.16mag, the faintest co-moving companion of an exoplanet host star imaged directly. HD3651B is not detected in the POSS-II B-, R- and I-band images, indicating that this object is fainter than ~20mag in the B- and R-band and fainter than \~19mag in the I-band. With the Hipparcos distance of HD3651 of 11pc, the absolute magnitude of HD3651B is about 16.5mag in the H band. Our H-band photometry and the Baraffe et al. (2003) evolutionary models yield a mass of HD3651B to be 20 to 60MJup for assumed ages between 1 and 10Gyr. The effective temperature ranges between 800 and 900K, consistent with a spectral type of T7 to T8. We conclude that HD3651B is a brown-dwarf companion, the first of its kind directly imaged as a companion of an exoplanet host star, and one of the faintest T dwarfs found in the solar vicinity (within 11pc).