First High‐Contrast Science with an Integral Field Spectrograph: The Substellar Companion to GQ Lupi

Abstract

We present commissioning data from the OSIRIS integral field spectrograph (IFS) on the Keck II 10 m telescope that demonstrate the utility of adaptive optics IFS spectroscopy in studying faint close-in substellar companions in the halos of bright stars. Our R ≈ 2000 J- and H-band spectra of the substellar companion to the 1-10 Myr old GQ Lup complement existing K-band spectra and photometry and improve on the original estimate of its spectral type. We find that GQ Lup B is somewhat hotter (M6-L0) than reported in the discovery paper by Neuhauser and collaborators (M9-L4), mainly due to the surface gravity sensitivity of the K-band spectral classification indices used by the discoverers. Spectroscopic features characteristic of low surface gravity objects, such as lack of alkali absorption and a triangular H-band continuum, are indeed prominent in our spectrum of GQ Lup B. The peculiar shape of the H-band continuum and the difference between the two spectral type estimates is well explained in the context of the diminishing strength of H2 collision-induced absorption with decreasing surface gravity, as recently proposed for young ultracool dwarfs by Kirkpatrick and collaborators. Using our updated spectroscopic classification of GQ Lup B and a reevaluation of the age and heliocentric distance of the primary, we perform a comparative analysis of the available substellar evolutionary models to estimate the mass of the companion. We find that the mass of GQ Lup B is 0.010-0.040 M☉. Hence, it is unlikely to be a wide-orbit counterpart to the known radial velocity extrasolar planets, whose masses are 0.015 M☉. Instead, GQ Lup A/B is probably a member of a growing family of very low mass ratio widely separated binaries discovered through high-contrast imaging.