Spectrophotometric characterization of high proper motion sources from WISE

Abstract

The census of the solar neighbourhood is almost complete for stars and becoming more complete in the brown dwarf regime. Spectroscopic, photometric and kinematic characterization of nearby objects helps us to understand the local mass function, the binary fraction, and provides new targets for sensitive planet searches. We aim to derive spectral types and spectrophotometric distances of a sample of new high proper motion sources found with the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) satellite, and obtain parallaxes for those objects that fall within the area observed by the Vista Variables in the Via Lactea survey (VVV). We used low-resolution spectroscopy and template fitting to derive spectral types, multiwave-length photometry to characterize the companion candidates and obtain photometric distances. Multi-epoch imaging from the VVV survey was used to measure the parallaxes and proper motions for three sources. We confirm a new T2 brown dwarf within similar to 15 pc. We derived optical spectral types for 24 sources, mostly M dwarfs within 50 pc. We addressed the wide binary nature of 16 objects found by the WISE mission and previously known high proper motion sources. Six of these are probably members of wide binaries, two of those are new, and present evidence against the physical binary nature of two candidate binary stars found in the literature, and eight that we selected as possible binary systems. We discuss a likely microlensing event produced by a nearby low-mass star and a galaxy, that is to occur in the following five years.