We find a new substellar companion to the Pleiades member star, Pleiades HII 3441, using the Subaru telescope with adaptive optics. The discovery is made as part of the high-contrast imaging survey to search for planetary-mass and substellar companions in the Pleiades and young moving groups. The companion has a projected separation of 0.'' 49 +/- 0.'' 02 (66 +/- 2 au) and a mass of 68 +/- 5 M-J based on three observations in the J-, H-, and K-s-bands. The spectral type is estimated to be M7 (similar to 2700 K), and thus no methane absorption is detected in the H band. Our Pleiades observations result in the detection of two substellar companions including one previously reported among 20 observed Pleiades stars, and indicate that the fraction of substellar companions in the Pleiades is about 10.0(-8.8)(+26.1)%. This is consistent with multiplicity studies of both the Pleiades stars and other open clusters.

We compared the number of faint stars detected in deep survey fields with the current stellar distribution model of the Galaxy and found that the detected number in the H band is significantly smaller than the predicted number. This indicates that M-dwarfs, the major component, are fewer in the halo and the thick disk. We used archived data of several surveys in both the north and south field of GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey), MODS (MOIRCS Deep Survey) in GOODS-N, and ERS (Early Release Science) and CANDELS (Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey) in GOODS-S. The number density of M-dwarfs in the halo has to be 20%+/- 13% relative to that in the solar vicinity, in order for the detected number of stars fainter than 20.5 mag in the H band to match with the predicted value from the model. In the thick disk, the number density of M-dwarfs must be reduced (52%+/- 13%) or the scale height must be decreased (similar to 600 pc). Alternatively, overall fractions of the halo and thick disks can be significantly reduced to achieve the same effect, because our sample mainly consists of faint M-dwarfs. Our results imply that the M-dwarf population in regions distant from the Galactic plane is significantly smaller than previously thought. We then discussed the implications this has on the suitability of the model predictions for the prediction of non-companion faint stars in direct imaging extrasolar planet surveys by using the best-fitting number densities.

Abstract There are faint contaminants near primary stars in the direct imaging of exoplanets. Our goal is to estimate statistically the ratio of exoplanets in the detected batch of point sources by calculating the fraction of contamination. In this study, we compared the detected number of stars with the number of contaminants predicted by our model. We found that the observed number of faint stars were fewer than the predicted results towards the Pleiades and GOODS-South field when the parameters of the conventional stellar distribution models were employed. We thus estimated new model parameters in correspondence to the results of the observations.

We carried out an imaging survey for extrasolar planets around stars in the Pleiades (125 Myr, 135 pc) in the $H$ and $K_{S}$ bands using HiCIAO combined with the adaptive optics, AO188, on the Subaru telescope. We found 13 companion candidates fainter than 14.5 mag in the $H$ band around 9 stars. Five of these 13 were confirmed to be background stars by measurement of their proper motion. One was not found in the second epoch observation, and thus was not a background or companion object. One had multi-epoch image, but the precision of its proper motion was not sufficient to conclude whether it was background object. Four other candidates are waiting for second epoch observations to determine their proper motion. Finally, the remaining 2 were confirmed to be 60 $M_{J}$ brown dwarf companions orbiting around HD 23514 (G0) and HII 1348 (K5) respectively, as had been reported in previous studies. In our observations, the average detection limit for a point source was 20.3 mag in the $H$ band beyond 1''.5 from the central star. On the basis of this detection limit, we calculated the detection efficiency to be 90% for a planet with 6 to 12 Jovian masses and a semi-major axis of 50--1000 AU. For this we extrapolated the distribution of planet mass and semi-major axis derived from RV observations and adopted the planet evolution model of Baraffe et al. (2003). As there was no detection of a planet, we estimated the frequency of such planets to be less than 17.9% ($2\sigma$) around one star of the Pleiades cluster.