A Search for the Coolest Brown Dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood

Details A Search for the Coolest Brown Dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood A Search for the Coolest Brown Dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood

Aug 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010noao.prop..184m&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2010B-0184

Physics

Scientific paper

Brown dwarfs provide a natural link between the physics of stars and gas giant planets. Although hundreds of brown dwarfs have been discovered to date, a gap of over 400 K remains between the coolest brown dwarfs known (Teff ~ 600 K) and Jupiter (Teff ~ 128 K). Detailed studies of these cool brown dwarfs will allow us to place constraints on the low-mass end of the mass function and to extend our studies of low-temperature, high-pressure atmospheric physics and chemistry. One of the primary science goals of the Wide- Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a NASA mission that is surveying the entire sky at 4 mid-infrared wavelengths, is to identify such cool brown dwarfs. We therefore propose to observe brown dwarf candidates identified by WISE at YJH using the NIR imager PANIC on Magellan. The proposed observations will allow us to confirm the cool nature of the candidates, begin to characterize the spectral properties of the coldest brown dwarfs, and identify interesting targets for spectroscopic followup. WISE has already found two new brown dwarfs that have been confirmed spectroscopically, and over a hundred similar candidates have been found that require NIR imaging follow-up.

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