Authors

Neil Zimmerman (1,2), Ben R. Oppenheimer (2,1), Sasha Hinkley (3), Douglas Brenner (2), Ian Parry (4), Anand Sivaramakrishnan (2)

Affiliations

(1) Columbia University; (2) American Museum of Natural History; (3) California Institute of Technology; (4) Cambridge Institute of Astronomy

Abstract

I will review some of the initial science results from Project 1640, a coronagraphic integral field spectrograph at Palomar Observatory. One of these, emerging from our survey of nearby A stars, is the discovery of an M-dwarf companion to Alcor. To reach this point, we first needed to solve some data reduction problems particular to this kind of instrument, including the automatic translation of 4*10^4 closely-packed, coarsely-sampled focal plane spectra to data cubes. We confirmed the physical association between Alcor and the fainter neighboring star (at 1" separation and a contrast of 6 magnitudes) using a novel method of high precision relative astrometry applied to two data sets acquired just 100 days apart, demonstrating common parallactic and proper motion. The same data provided a low-resolution near-infrared spectrum spanning the J and H bands, enabling us to classify the companion as an M3-M4 dwarf. In a separate experiment, we have used Project 1640 as an imaging spectrograph without a coronagraph to achieve spectrally-resolved sub-aperture interferometry with a non-redundant mask.