20 candidates from Gemini NICI Planet-Finding Campaign

http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3900



I wonder how many of them would be true planets?

This review is much more earlier and has a good chance for the discovery of many photographic planets orbiting a yellow dwarf.

I do like that bit "and show only the closest candidate for each star". Wonder if there are any more systems like HR 8799 in that sample...

http://www.gemini.edu/node/12025

Gemini Observatory’s Planet-Finding Campaign finds that, around many types of stars, distant gas-giant planets are rare and prefer to cling close to their parent stars. The impact on theories of planetary formation could be significant

Resurrecting a long time quiescent thread...

New imaged brown dwarfs, a further binary (M dwarf) companion to *V921 Sco and a super-Jupiter planet candidate to *V1295 Aql

Gemini-LIGHTS: Herbig Ae/Be and massive T-Tauri protoplanetary disks imaged with Gemini Planet Imager

Quote :

We present the complete sample of protoplanetary disks from the Gemini- Large Imaging with GPI Herbig/T-tauri Survey (Gemini-LIGHTS) which observed bright Herbig Ae/Be stars and T-Tauri stars in near-infrared polarized light to search for signatures of disk evolution and ongoing planet formation. The 44 targets were chosen based on their near- and mid-infrared colors, with roughly equal numbers of transitional, pre-transitional, and full disks. Our approach explicitly did not favor well-known, "famous" disks or those observed by ALMA, resulting in a less-biased sample suitable to probe the major stages of disk evolution during planet formation. Our optimized data reduction allowed polarized flux as low as 0.002% of the stellar light to be detected, and we report polarized scattered light around 80% of our targets. We detected point-like companions for 47% of the targets, including 3 brown dwarfs (2 confirmed, 1 new), and a new super-Jupiter mass candidate around V1295 Aql. We searched for correlations between the polarized flux and system parameters, finding a few clear trends: presence of a companion drastically reduces the polarized flux levels, far-IR excess correlates with polarized flux for non-binary systems, and systems hosting disks with ring structures have stellar masses < 3 M_Sun. Our sample also included four hot, dusty "FS CMa" systems and we detected large-scale (>100 au) scattered light around each, signs of extreme youth for these enigmatic systems. Science-ready images are publicly available through multiple distribution channels using a new FITS file standard jointly developed with members of the VLT/SPHERE team.

Emphasis mine.

It is interesting to note that BD companions to MWC 297 and HD 158643 (=51 Oph) are within the Habitable Zones of their very bright stars and the one of HD 101412 could be circumbinary if an inner M dwarf companion is confirmed too.

A low-mass companion desert among intermediate-mass visual binaries: The scaled-up counterpart to the brown dwarf desert

Quote :

We present a high-contrast imaging survey of intermediate-mass (1.75--4.5 M⊙) stars to search for the most extreme stellar binaries, i.e., for the lowest mass stellar companions. Using adaptive optics at the Lick and Gemini observatories, we observed 169 stars and detected 24 candidates companions, 16 of which are newly discovered and all but three are likely or confirmed physical companions. Despite obtaining sensitivity down to the substellar limit for 75\% of our sample, we do not detect any companion below 0.3 M⊙, strongly suggesting that the distribution of stellar companions is truncated at a mass ratio of qmin≳0.075. Combining our results with known brown dwarf companions, we identify a low-mass companion desert to intermediate mass stars in the range 0.02≲q≲0.05, which quantitatively matches the known brown dwarf desert among solar-type stars. We conclude that the formation mechanism for multiple systems operates in a largely scale-invariant manner and precludes the formation of extremely uneven systems, likely because the components of a proto-binary accrete most of their mass after the initial cloud fragmentation. Similarly, the mechanism to form "planetary" (q≲0.02) companions likely scales linearly with stellar mass, probably as a result of the correlation between the masses of stars and their protoplanetary disks. Finally, we predict the existence of a sizable population of brown dwarf companions to low-mass stars and of a rising population of planetary-mass objects towards ≈1M_Jup around solar-type stars. Improvements on current instrumentation will test these predictions.

Substellar companions reported/confirmed at Pi1 Cancri, HIP 64892, HD 33632, HIP 75056, HR 6037, HD 130948, HD 284149.