Related papers: Interferometric Identification of a Pre-Brown Dwar…

Under the right conditions brown dwarfs that gain enough mass late in their lives to cross the hydrogen burning limit will not turn into low-mass stars, but rather remain essentially brown dwarf-like. While these objects, called either…

Brown Dwarfs (BDs) are crucial objects in our understanding of both star and planet formation. However, there is still an unconcluded debate about which is the dominant formation mechanism of these objects. For this, it is mandatory to…

The coolest known brown dwarfs are our best analogs to extrasolar gas-giant planets. The prolific detections of such cold substellar objects in the past two years has spurred intensive followup, but the lack of accurate distances is a key…

Hundreds of brown dwarfs (BDs) have been discovered in the last few years in stellar clusters and among field stars. BDs are almost as numerous as hydrogen burning stars and so a theory of star formation should also explain their origin.…

We review four mechanisms for forming brown dwarfs: (i) turbulent fragmentation (producing very low-mass prestellar cores); (ii) gravitational instabilities in discs; (iii) dynamical ejection of stellar embryos from their placental cores;…

The formation of objects below or close to the hydrogen burning limit is currently vividly discussed and is one of the main open issues in the field of the origins of stars and planets. Applying various observational techniques, we explored…

We review our present understanding of the physical properties of substellar objects, brown dwarfs and irradiated or non-irradiated gaseous exoplanets. This includes a description of their internal properties, mechanical structure and heat…

Brown dwarf formation and star formation efficiency are studied using a nested grid simulation that covers five orders of magnitude in spatial scale (10^4 - 0.1AU). Starting with a rotating magnetized compact cloud with a mass of 0.22…

Characterization of the properties of young brown dwarfs are important to constraining the formation of objects at the extreme low-mass end of the IMF. While young brown dwarfs share many properties with solar-mass T Tauri stars,…

We discuss the spectral energy distribution of three very low mass objects in Chamaeleon I for which ground-based spectroscopy and photometry as well as ISO measurements in the mid-infrared are available (Comeron et al. 2000; Persi et al.…

Recent observations point to the presence of structured dust grains in the discs surrounding young brown dwarfs, thus implying that the first stages of planet formation take place also in the sub-stellar regime. Here, we investigate the…

Giant planets form in protoplanetary disks while these disks are still gas-rich, and can reveal their presence through the annular gaps they carve out. HD 100546 is a gas-rich disk with a wide gap between between a radius of ~1 and 13 AU,…

A large fraction of the observed brown dwarfs may form by gravitational fragmentation of unstable discs. This model reproduces the brown dwarf desert, and provides an explanation the existence of planetary-mass objects and for the binary…

We suggest that a high proportion of brown dwarfs are formed by gravitational fragmentation of massive extended discs around Sun-like stars. Such discs should arise frequently, but should be observed infrequently, precisely because they…

Observations of accretion disks around young brown dwarfs have led to the speculation that they may form planetary systems similar to normal stars. While there have been several detections of planetary-mass objects around brown dwarfs…

We aim at understanding the formation of cloud layers in quasi-static substellar atmospheres. The time-dependent description presented in (Helling & Woitke 2006) is a kinetic model describing nucleation, growth and evaporation. It is…

Brown dwarfs that gain mass through binary interactions may be pushed above the boundary that divides brown dwarfs from low-mass stars: the hydrogen burning limit (HBL). Some of these objects will make their way to the main sequence and may…

In this review, we examine the successes and weaknesses of modern low-mass star and brown dwarf theory.(1) We first focus on the mechanical (equation of state) and thermal (atmosphere) properties and on the evolution. We then examine the…

Analysis of initial observations from near-infrared sky surveys has shown that the resulting photometric catalogues, combined with far-red optical data, provide an extremely effective method of finding isolated, very low-temperature objects…

We present CARMA 1.3 mm continuum data of the disk surrounding the young brown dwarf 2MASS J044427+2512 in the Taurus molecular cloud. The high angular resolution of the CARMA observations (0.16 arcsec) allows us to spatially resolve for…