Very Low Mass Stellar and Substellar Companions to Solar-like Stars from MARVELS. IV. A Candidate Brown Dwarf or Low-mass Stellar Companion to HIP 67526

Abstract

We report the discovery of a candidate brown dwarf (BD) or a very low mass stellar companion (MARVELS-5b) to the star HIP 67526 from the Multi-object Apache point observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey (MARVELS). The radial velocity curve for this object contains 31 epochs spread over 2.5 yr. Our Keplerian fit, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach, reveals that the companion has an orbital period of $90.2695^{+0.0188}_{-0.0187}$ days, an eccentricity of 0.4375 ± 0.0040, and a semi-amplitude of $2948.14^{+16.65}_{-16.55}$ m s–1. Using additional high-resolution spectroscopy, we find the host star has an effective temperature T eff = 6004 ± 34 K, a surface gravity log g (cgs) =4.55 ± 0.17, and a metallicity [Fe/H] =+0.04 ± 0.06. The stellar mass and radius determined through the empirical relationship of Torres et al. yields 1.10 ± 0.09 M ☉ and 0.92 ± 0.19 R ☉. The minimum mass of MARVELS-5b is 65.0 ± 2.9M Jup, indicating that it is likely to be either a BD or a very low mass star, thus occupying a relatively sparsely populated region of the mass function of companions to solar-type stars. The distance to this system is 101 ± 10 pc from the astrometric measurements of Hipparcos. No stellar tertiary is detected in the high-contrast images taken by either FastCam lucky imaging or Keck adaptive optics imaging, ruling out any star with mass greater than 0.2 M ☉ at a separation larger than 40 AU.