ES-03-0030

Snapshot A-Star Survey: Deriving Main-Sequence Age for Intermediate-Mass Survey Targets

Adam JRW Smith, Eric L Nielsen, Jennifer Patience, Maraj Brinjikji, Jasmine Garani, Jason Wang, Thomas Esposito, Justin Hom, Robert J De Rosa, Emma Softich

Our ongoing survey campaign aims to discover wide separation, substellar companions of intermediate-mass late-B and A stars. Since brown dwarfs and giant planets cool over time, stellar age is a vital parameter for the characterization of any substellar companions discovered by our survey. The work presented here will derive the main-sequence ages of our campaign’s target stars. These ages will also be critical to completeness calculations. Ages for intermediate- and high-mass stars can be derived by fitting to their color-magnitude diagram position, which changes over the main sequence lifetime of the star. CMD position is also impacted by unknown stellar physical parameters such as [Fe/H] and vsini. Past work has marginalized over these parameters. To improve age estimates, we are directly deriving these stellar parameters from high-resolution spectra acquired with APO 3.5m / ARCES.