A giant planet candidate near a young brown dwarf - Direct VLT/NACO observations using IR wavefront sensing

We present deep VLT/NACO infrared imaging and spectroscopic observations of the brown dwarf 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254, obtained during our on-going adaptive optics survey of southern young, nearby associations. This similar to25 M-Jup brown dwarf, located similar to70 pc from Earth, has been recently identified as a member of the TW Hydrae Association (age similar to 8 Myr). Using adaptive optics infrared wavefront sensing to acquire sharp images of its circurnstellar environment, we discovered a very faint and very red object at a close separation of similar to780 mas (similar to55 AU). Photometry in the H, K-s and L' bands and upper limit in J-band are compatible with a spectral type L5-L9.5. Near-infrared spectroscopy is consistent with this spectral type estimate. Different evolutionary models predict an object within the planetary regime with a mass of M = 5 +/- 2 M-Jup and an effective temperature of T-eff = 1250 +/- 200 K.