An overlooked brown dwarf neighbour (T7.5 at d ∼ 5 pc) of the Sun and two additional T dwarfs at about 10 pc

Abstract

Context. Although many new brown dwarf (BD) neighbours have recently been discovered thanks to new sky surveys in the mid-and near-infrared (MIR, NIR), their numbers are still more than five times lower than those of stars in the same volume. Aims. Our aim is to detect and classify new BDs to eventually complete their census in the immediate solar neighbourhood. Methods. We combined multi-epoch data from sky surveys at different wavelengths to detect BD neighbours of the Sun by their high proper motion (HPM). We concentrated on relatively bright MIR (w2 < 13.5) BD candidates from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) expected to be so close to the Sun that they may also be seen in older NIR (Two Micron All Sky Survey-2MASS-; DEep Near-Infrared Survey-DENIS) or even red optical (Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) i-and z-band, SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys (SSS) I-band) surveys. With low-resolution NIR spectroscopy we classified the new BDs and estimated their distances and velocities. Results. We have discovered the HPM (μ ∼ 470 mas/yr) T7.5 dwarf, WISE J0521+1025, which is at d = 5.0 ± 1.3 pc from the Sun the nearest known T dwarf in the northern sky, and two early T dwarfs, WISE J0457-0207 (T2) and WISE J2030+0749 (T1.5), with proper motions of ∼120 and ∼670 mas/yr and distances of 12.5 ± 3.1 pc and 10.5 ± 2.6 pc, respectively. The last one was independently discovered and also classified as a T1.5 dwarf by Mace and coworkers. All three show thin disc kinematics. They may have been overlooked in the past owing to overlapping images and because of problems with matching objects between different surveys and measuring their proper motions. © 2013 ESO.