News

News

An Earth-sized exoplanet ripe for emission spectroscopy with JWST in orbit around a nearby ultracool dwarf star (Gillon, M. et al. 2023 – Submitted to Nature, under review)

UKIRT has assisted in the discovery of SPECULOOS-3 b—an earth-sized exoplanet in a 17 hour orbit around an M6.5-type dwarf star 16.8 parsecs away. A K-band transit light curve was obtained from UKIRT using the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) on two epochs. The exoplanet is suitable for spectroscopic studies from JWST.

Pictured below are the phase-folded transit light curves of SPECULOOS-3 b. The purple light curve at the bottom shows the K-band photometry obtained using UKIRT and WFCAM.

You can read the article using this link: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3678312/v1
Or you can read the published version here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-024-02271-2

UKIRT Hemisphere Surveys (UHS)

Conducted by the US Naval Observatory (USNO) in partnership with the UH IfA, Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, and the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit, ROE, Edinburgh using the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM) covering the northern sky from 0 — +60° in declination (12,700 sq. degrees), UHS has data releases in J and more recently K-bands. Surveys done in H-band are nearly complete with a new survey of Y-band and a reobservation in J-band starting in late 2023. Regions previously covered in the UKIDSS sky survey have been excluded in the current rounds of the UHS survey.

You can see a current coverage chart in each band individually or altogether at this link: http://casu.ast.cam.ac.uk/wfcamsp/uhs

Redder than Red: Discovery of an Exceptionally Red L/T Transition Dwarf (Schneider A. et al., 2023, ApJ, 943L..16)

UKIRT has discovered a free-floating planetary mass brown dwarf, J050626.96+073842.4 (pictured below).

J050626.96+073842.4 has the reddest known colors of any brown dwarf around L/T transition young and very dusty atmosphere. Below is photometric data from the UHS survey and the USNO-UKIRT parallax.

Astronomy and Photometry for ~1000 L, T, and Y Dwarfs from the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey (Schneider A. et al., 2023AJ, 166, 103)

From the UHS, UKIRT has ascertained the positions, photometry and proper motions for 966 known Brown Dwarfs. The measured proper motions are more precise than those from CatWISE and Pan-STARRS, but not Gaia – a valuable resource for non-Gaia point sources. The figure below is a comparison between the proper motion measurements and those from Gaia, CatWISE, and Pan-STARRS.