Discovery of companion to Very Low Mass binary using Very Large Telescope
Using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) of European Southern Observatory (ESO, Chile) specifically the Nasmyth Adaptive Optics System (NAOS) and Near-Infrared Imager and Spectrograph (CONICA), popularly known as NaCo (Lenzen et al. 2003; Rousset et al. 2003), two M-dwarfs LP 1033-31 and LP 877-72 were observed under programme ID 091.C-0501(B). A total of 20 frames were observed in each of the JHKs photometric bands for LP 1033-31 on
2013 July 2. On the same night, LP 877-72 was also observed for 30 frames in each of the JHKs photometric bands. The exposure time for individual frames was of 30 s. In order to allow an efficient reduction of the sky background, each image was jittered using a jitter box of 5 arcsec. All the observations for LP 1033-31 were obtained within an airmass range of 1.049–1.051, whereas LP 877-72 were observed within the airmass ranging from 1.002 to 1.010. The seeing condition for the day of observation was also very good (< 0.85 arcsec). S13 camera was used with a field of view of 14 arcsec × 14 arcsec and a pixel scale of 13.2 mas per pixel.
Using the high-resolution near-infrared adaptive optics imaging from the NaCo instrument at the Very Large Telescope, we reported the discovery of a new binary companion to the M-dwarf LP 1033-31 and also confirmed the binarity of LP 877-72. We have characterized both the stellar systems and estimated the properties of their individual components.
[Image Credit: Karmakar et al. (2020)]