ASPCS
 
Back to Volume
Paper: New Surveys for Brown Dwarfs and Their Impact on the IMF
Volume: 448, 16th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems, and the Sun
Page: 323
Authors: Kirkpatrick, J. D.
Abstract: Although first predicted to exist in the early 1960s, brown dwarfs were not discovered in bulk until decades later by deep, large-area, infrared-capable surveys such as 2MASS, SDSS, and DENIS. Hundreds of examples are now known, enabling the study of brown dwarfs as a population in their own right. Despite these successes, only the warmest brown dwarfs have so far been identified. The coolest brown dwarfs currently known are field late-T dwarfs with Teff≈500–600K and implied masses of around 5-35 MJup for assumed ages of 1-10 Gyr. Foremost is the question of what cooler objects will look like spectroscopically and whether a new spectral class beyond T, dubbed “Y”, will be needed. These cooler field brown dwarfs must exist, as studies of young star formation regions have revealed objects even lower in mass, which, at the age of the field population, will have cooled to temperatures well below 500K. Finding and characterizing such cold objects will set important boundary conditions on the shape of the initial mass function at the lowest masses and determine what the low-mass cut-off for star formation is. Here I highlight discoveries from the latest generation of brown dwarf surveys – UKIDSS, CFBDS, and the recently launched WISE – and discuss their impact on our understanding of the field mass function at very low masses.
Back to Volume