A search for wide brown dwarf companions to stars within 10 pc

Abstract

We present the first results of a large imaging survey to identify wide brown dwarf companions to stars within 10 pc. We have performed a deep (H‐band limit ∼19.0 mag), wide field (up to 16×16 arcmin) astrometric imaging campaign in two epochs around more than 230 nearby stars.Preliminary results show that the wide low‐mass companion fraction is far lower than expected, indicating that interactions with the galactic disk may have removed the weakly bound wide companions around old stars.