The Effect of Grain Opacity on Brown Dwarf Spectra

Details The Effect of Grain Opacity on Brown Dwarf Spectra The Effect of Grain Opacity on Brown Dwarf Spectra

Dec 1992

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1992aas...181.2309l&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 181st AAS Meeting, #23.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 24, p.1159

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We have constructed relatively simple spectra for solar-composition brown dwarfs in an effort to understand the effect of grain opacity on the slope of the spectrum and hence on the interpretation of candidate brown dwarfs using model H-R diagrams. The motivation for the study comes from recent activity by Ruan (1990) and Allard (1991) in modeling late-M dwarf spectra, wherein for effective temperatures below 3000K difficulty is found in fitting the overall flux distributions simultaneously in the near-infrared and infrared. The misfit is sufficiently severe that significant modifications to the atmospheric adiabats were proposed by Ruan (1991) to explain the poor fits. We explore here a different possibility, that grain opacity in these atmospheres could alter the shape of the spectrum. For this paper we focus on objects with effective temperatures less than 2000K, and use relatively low resolution spectra. We find that grains tend to alter the flux distribution in a way which could in principle resolve some of the M-dwarf discrepancy. We also use the spectra to compute preliminary color corrections which serve to indicate roughly the direction and magnitude of the error associated with assuming a blackbody distribution in comparing candidate brown dwarfs with theory. Allard, F 1990. Dissertation, Heidelberg. Ruan, K. 1991. Dissertation, ANU, Canberra This research was supported by NSF grant AST89-10780.

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