Chemical abundances of stars with brown-dwarf

07/07/2014

The weak boundary that separates giant planets and brown dwarfs (BD, objects that have enough mass to burn deuterium but not for hydrogen fusion) and their formation mechanism are still not well known. In a recent work, Daniel Mata Sánchez (La Caixa SO PhD student at the IAC) and coworkers have analyzed spectra for a sample of stars with BD companions and have compared their chemical abundances with those of a sample of stars with known giant and small planets. They find that the composition of stars with BDs is more similar to that of stars with low-mass planets than to those of giant-planet hosts.