The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (BDKP): How Distances Both Advance and Complicate Our Understanding of the Brown Dwarf Population

Details The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (BDKP): How Distances Both Advance and Complicate Our Understanding of the Brown Dwarf Population The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (BDKP): How Distances Both Advance and Complicate Our Understanding of the Brown Dwarf Population

Jan 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011aas...21722605f&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #217, #226.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 43, 2011

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The distances and kinematics of brown dwarfs provide key statistical constraints on their ages, moving group membership, absolute brightnesses, evolutionary trends, and multiplicity. Yet fundamental measurements of parallax, proper motion and radial velocity have been made for only a relatively small fraction of the known brown dwarf population. To address this deficiency, we initiated the Brown Dwarf Kinematics (BDKP) which aims to measure and compile the 6D positions and velocities of all known brown dwarfs within 20 pc of the Sun and select sources of scientific interest. For the past four years we have been collecting parallax data on 84 ultracool dwarfs including 17 late-type M and L dwarfs demonstrating spectral signatures of youth, 3 subdwarfs, and 12 L/T transition objects, using the ANDICAM and ISPI imagers on the 1.3m and 4.0m telescopes (respectively) at CTIO. Combining our measurements with those from the literature, we re-examine color-magnitude and spectrophotometric relations as well as prominent color trends for the brown dwarf population. Using absolute magnitude relations in J,H, and K, we identify overluminous binary candidates and investigate known flux-reversal binaries. Using current evolutionary models, we compare the MK vs J-K color magnitude diagram to model predictions and find the low-surface gravity dwarfs are significantly redward and underluminous of predictions and a handful of late-type T dwarfs may require clouds to account for the observed scatter in absolute magnitude.

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