|Speaker||Talk Date||Talk Series|
|Neil Zimmerman (AMNH)||17 February 2010||Institute of Astronomy Seminars|
Project 1640 is a new integral field spectrograph and coronagraph at Palomar Observatory. I will demonstrate the capabilities of this new instrument by reviewing one of our first results, the discovery of an M-dwarf companion to Alcor, a main sequence A star at a distance of 25 pc. We confirmed the physical association between the stars using a novel method of high precision relative astrometry applied to two images taken just 100 days apart, demonstrating that the companion shares common parallactic and proper motion with its host star. The same data gave us a low-resolution near-infrared spectrum spanning the J and H bands, enabling us to classify the companion as an M3-M4 dwarf.