A Disk Census for Young Brown Dwarfs
Abstract
Recent surveys have identified sub-stellar objects down to planetary masses in nearby star-forming regions. Reliable determination of the disk frequency in young brown dwarfs is of paramount importance to understanding their origin. Here we report the results of a systematic study of infrared L'-band (3.8-micron) disk excess in ~50 spectroscopically confirmed objects near and below the sub-stellar boundary in several young clusters. Our observations, using the ESO Very Large Telescope, Keck I and the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, reveal that a significant fraction of brown dwarfs harbor disks at a very young age. Their inner disk lifetimes do not appear to be vastly different from those of disks around T Tauri stars. Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that sub-stellar objects form via a mechanism similar to solar-mass stars.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0305412,
title = {A Disk Census for Young Brown Dwarfs},
author = {Ray Jayawardhana and David R. Ardila and Beate Stelzer and Karl E. Haisch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0305412},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal