Abstract
We have studied the molecular outflows driven by a potential proto-brown dwarf candidate IRAS 16253-2429 (hereafter IRAS 16253) with CO (2—1) using SMA and IRAM 30m telescope and CO (6—5) using APEX. Our SMA observations suggest that IRAS 16253 is hosting a binary system. The low mass of its envelope suggests that the central objects may eventually accrete only ~0.14 Msun of material (assuming the star formation efficiency is at most 0.3), which makes IRAS 16253 a potential proto brown dwarf binary system since the maximum mass of a brown dwarf is 0.08 Msun; one or two brown dwarfs may form depending on the current mass of the protostars and the future accretion process. The Position-Velocity diagrams of the outflows show sinusoidal structures which may be related to the outflow wiggling from the binary rotation. This allowed us to estimate the orbital period of the binary system. On the basis of Kepler's third law, we suggest that IRAS 16253 is very likely to contain at least one proto brown dwarf if the binary separation is less than ~0.5 arcsec. The large-scale outflows are further mapped with IRAM 30m telescope and APEX Champ+. We found that CO (6—5) traces high-excited gas around the precessing H2 jets and CO (2—1) likely probes the cold swept-up gas or entrained gas with cone-like structure.