Bibcode
Martín, E. L.; Brandner, W.; Bouy, H.; Basri, G.; Davis, J.; Deshpande, R.; Montgomery, M. M.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 456, Issue 1, September II 2006, pp.253-259
Advertised on:
9
2006
Journal
Citations
26
Refereed citations
23
Description
Using the low-resolution mode of the Space Telescope Imaging
Spectrograph (STIS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), we obtain
spectra from 20 spatially-resolved, ultracool dwarfs, eighteen of which
belong to nine very low-mass binary systems with known angular
separations in the range 0.37 arcsec-0.098 arcsec. For these dwarfs, we
derive their spectral types to be in the range dM7.5 to dL6 by either
obtaining their PC3 index value or by comparing our STIS spectra with
ground-based spectra of similar spectral resolution from Martín
et al. (1999b). We have searched for Hα emission in each object,
but the emission is clearly detected in only two of them. We find that
the distribution of Hα emission in our sample is statistically
different from that of single field dwarfs, suggesting an intriguing
anti-correlation between chromospheric activity and binarity for M7-M9.5
dwarfs. We provide strength measuments of the main photospheric
features. We derive calibrations of spectral subclasses versus F814W and
K-band absolute magnitudes for a subset of 10 dwarfs in 5 binaries that
have known trigonometric parallaxes.