Mergerburst Transients of Brown Dwarfs with Exoplanets

Ealeal Bear, Amit Kashi, Noam Soker

Published 2011-04-20, updated 2011-06-02Version 2

We explore the properties of an optical transient event formed by the destruction of a planet by a brown dwarf (BD) -- a BD-planet mergerburst. When a massive planet approaches a BD towards a merging process it will be tidally destroyed and will form an accretion disk around the BD. The viscosity in the disk sets the characteristic time for the event -- several days. We suggest that BD-planet mergerburst events have light curves resembling those of other intermediate luminosity optical transient (ILOT) events, such as V838 Mon, but at shorter timescales and lower luminosities. With the high percentage coverage of the sky, we expect that such events will be detected in the near future.