Rotation periods and astrometric motions of the Luhman 16AB brown dwarfs by high-resolution lucky-imaging monitoring

Abstract

Context. Photometric monitoring of the variability of brown dwarfs can provide useful information about the structure of clouds in their cold atmospheres.The brown-dwarf binary system Luhman 16AB is an interesting target for such a study, because its components stand at the L/T transition and show high levels of variability. Luhman 16AB is also the third closest system to the solar system, which allows precise astrometric investigations with ground-based facilities.