Proto-Brown Dwarfs II. Results in Ophiuchus and Taurus

Details Proto-Brown Dwarfs II. Results in Ophiuchus and Taurus Proto-Brown Dwarfs II. Results in Ophiuchus and Taurus

May 1994

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1994aas...184.4303p&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, 184th AAS Meeting, #43.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 26, p.930

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

1

Scientific paper

We review our method for finding substellar mass self-gravitating clumps (``proto-brown dwarfs'') in nearby molecular clouds, using mm-wave telescopes (Pound and Blitz 1993). The method represents a novel approach to looking for brown dwarfs and, for the nearest molecular clouds, has a greater mass sensitivity than traditional methods. We show how the method can distinguish between various functional forms of the low-mass (< 0.2 M_&sun;) stellar initial mass function, which is currently poorly constrained. In both molecular line and continuum searches in the Ophiuchus B2 and Barnard 18 (in Taurus) star-forming regions, we find no clear-cut evidence of any proto-brown dwarfs. This negative result is surprising; even if the initial mass function were flat, we would expect to have found ~ 10. There are a few objects near our detection limit (0.01 M_&sun;) which deserve further scrutiny. However, even if all these candidates turn out to be true proto-brown dwarfs, the IMF in Oph B2 in the lowest mass range cannot have a power-law index greater than alpha ~ 1 Finally we discuss why the ambient pressure in molecular clouds may play a role in determining the IMF, and ultimately may create a low-mass cutoff.

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