Revisiting Physical Parameters of the Benchmark Brown Dwarf LHS 6343 C through a Hubble Space Telescope/WFC3 Secondary-eclipse Observation

Abstract

The LHS 6343 system consists of a resolved M-dwarf binary with an evolved, negligibly irradiated brown dwarf (BD), LHS 6343 C, orbiting the primary star. Such BD eclipsing binaries present rare and unique opportunities to calibrate substellar evolutionary and atmosphere models since mass, radius, temperature, and luminosity can be directly measured. We update this BD’s mass (62.6 ± 2.2 M _Jup ) and radius (0.788 ± 0.043 R _Jup ) using empirical stellar relations and a Gaia Data Release 3 distance. We use Hubble Space Telescope/Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) observations of an LHS 6343 C secondary eclipse to obtain a near-IR emission spectrum, which matches to a spectral type of T1.5 ± 1. We combine this spectrum with existing Kepler and Spitzer/IRAC secondary-eclipse photometry to perform atmospheric characterization using the ATMO-2020, Sonora-Bobcat, and BT-Settl model grids. ATMO-2020 models with strong nonequilibrium chemistry yield the best fit to observations across all modeled bandpasses while predicting physical parameters consistent with Gaia-dependent analogs. BT-Settl predicts values slightly more consistent with such analogs but offers a significantly poorer fit to the WFC3 spectrum. Finally, we obtain a semi-empirical measurement of LHS 6343 C’s apparent luminosity by integrating its observed and modeled spectral energy distribution. Applying knowledge of the system’s distance yields a bolometric luminosity of log( L _bol / L _☉ ) = −4.77 ± 0.03 and, applying the Stefan–Boltzmann law for the known radius, an effective temperature of 1303 ± 29 K. We also use the ATMO-2020 and Sonora-Bobcat evolutionary model grids to infer an age for LHS 6343 C of $2.86\hspace{0.08cm}{}_{-0.33}^{+0.40}\,\mathrm{Gyr}$ and $3.11\hspace{0.08cm}{}_{-0.38}^{+0.50}\,\mathrm{Gyr}$ respectively.

Keywords

• Brown dwarfs
• T dwarfs
• Time series analysis
• Infrared spectroscopy
• Fundamental parameters of stars
• Hubble Space Telescope