The SIMP Survey

The SIMP Survey

The Sondage Infrarouge de Mouvement Propre (SIMP) is a near-infrared all-sky survey that was initiated in early 2005 with the CPAPIR camera as a second epoch to 2MASS in the goal of identifying brown dwarfs with large proper motions. It covers ≈28% of the sky in MKO J band, mostly outside of the Galactic plane and at declinations below +40°.

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The SIMP survey achieved a depth of J≈17.2 at 5σ, and is thus≈0.5 magnitudes deeper than the 2MASS survey.

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The ≈5 years coverage between 2MASS and SIMP allowed measuring the proper motions of any near-infrared detection in the survey. A combination of proper motion and color cuts were used to identify and follow up hundreds of potential brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, 169 of which were confirmed as such with near-infrared spectroscopy. Several of these initial discoveries were also found independently by other teams before the final publication of the SIMP paper in 2016, but more than 100 objects with spectral types later than M6 are still original SIMP discoveries.

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SIMP papers

Here is a list of papers that are closely related to the SIMP survey:

  1. Artigau et al. 2009: This Cool Stars 19 conference proceeding presented the basic characteristics and initial results from the SIMP survey.
  2. Artigau et al. 2006: This paper relates the discovery of the bright and variable T dwarf SIMP J0136+0933. This T dwarf is now a heavily studied benchmark to understand weather patterns in brown dwarfs.
  3. Artigau et al. 2011: This paper reports on the discovery of two spatially resolved L+T binaries from the SIMP survey that display peculiar photometric properties.
  4. Gagné et al. 2014c: This paper reports the discovery of SIMP J2154-1055, a young candidate member of Argus, with an estimated mass of 10 times that of Jupiter, identified in the SIMP survey. It was classified as an L4 β dwarf in the discovery paper, but after accumulating more examples of young L-type brown dwarfs, its spectral type was later revised to L5 β/γ (Gagné et al. 2015c).
  5. Baron et al. 2015: This paper reports on the discovery of 14 large-separation common proper motion mid-M to mid-L companions to previously known low-mass stars. Several SIMP astrometric measurements and three near-infrared spectra from SIMP are reported in this work.
  6. Robert et al. 2016: This paper presents the main survey results from SIMP. It describes the survey characteristics and includes more than 170 new near-infrared spectra for late-M, L and T dwarfs. It includes the discovery of 6 red M and L dwarfs, 25 blue M and L dwarfs, two potential L+T binaries, 24 peculiar dwarfs, and 18 brown dwarfs near the L/T transition (L6-T4.5). A list of all new discoveries presented in this paper is compiled here.

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