Related papers: A global cloud map of the nearest known brown dwar…

Brown dwarfs, stars with insufficient mass to burn hydrogen, could contribute to the dark matter in the Galactic disk, galactic halos or even a background critical density. We consider the detectability of such brown dwarfs in various…

Observations of brown dwarfs provide important feedback on theories of atmospheres and inner structure of substellar objects. Brown dwarf binary systems furthermore offer the unique opportunity to determine the mass of individual brown…

We suggest that low-mass hydrogen-burning stars like the Sun should sometimes form with massive extended discs; and we show, by means of radiation hydrodynamic simulations, that the outer parts of such discs (R>100 AU) are likely to…

Irradiated brown dwarfs (BDs) provide natural laboratories to test our understanding of substellar and irradiated atmospheres. A handful of short-period BDs around white dwarfs (WDs) have been observed, but the uniquely intense UV-dominated…

The physics of brown dwarfs has continuously improved since the discovery of these astrophysical bodies. The first important developments were devoted to the description of their mechanical structure, with the derivation of an appropriate…

The origin of brown dwarfs (BDs) is an important component of the theory of star formation, because BDs are approximately as numerous as solar mass stars. It has been suggested that BDs originate from the gravitational fragmentation of…

"Brown dwarfs" is the collective name for objects more massive than giant planets such as Jupiter but less massive than M dwarf stars. This review gives a brief description of the classification and chemistry of low mass dwarfs. The current…

We are living in a dusty universe: dust is ubiquitously seen in a wide variety of astrophysical environments, ranging from circumstellar envelopes around cool red giants to supernova ejecta, from diffuse and dense interstellar clouds and…

Electric discharges were detected directly in the cloudy atmospheres of Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, are debatable for Venus, and indirectly inferred for Neptune and Uranus in our solar system. Sprites (and other types of transient luminous…

The formation of brown dwarfs (BDs) due to the fragmentation of proto-stellar disks undergoing pairwise encounters was investigated. High resolution allowed the use of realistic initial disk models where both the vertical structure and the…

The current picture painted by the observations of circumstellar dust at white dwarfs, and the consequent atmospheric pollution, is of a surviving planetary system. This chapter recounts in detail both the discovery and empirical…

Recent discoveries of variable brown dwarfs have provided us with a new window into their three-dimensional cloud structure. The highest variables are found at the L/T transition, where the cloud cover is thought to break up, but…

The transition between the two lowest-luminosity spectral classes of brown dwarfs--the L dwarfs and T dwarfs--is traversed by nearly all brown dwarfs as they cool over time. Yet distinct features of this transition, such as the "J-band…

Infrared excesses due to dusty disks have been observed orbiting white dwarfs with effective temperatures between 7200 K and 25000 K, suggesting that the rate of tidal disruption of minor bodies massive enough to create a coherent disk…

We present a new grid of cloudy atmosphere and evolution models for substellar objects. These models include the effect of refractory cloud species, including silicate clouds, on the spectra and evolution. We include effective temperatures…

We review the current picture of disks around cool stars and brown dwarfs, including disk fractions, mass estimates, disk structure and dispersal, accretion, dust composition, and the debris disk phase. We discuss these in the framework of…

As brown dwarfs and young giant planets cool down, they are known to experience various chemical transitions --- for example from CO rich L-dwarfs to methane rich T-dwarfs. Those chemical transitions are accompanied by spectral transitions…

Brown dwarfs are natural clocks, cooling and dimming over time due to insufficient core fusion. They are also numerous and present in nearly all Galactic environments, making them potentially useful chronometers for a variety of Galactic…

We report initial results from a {\it Herschel} program to search for far-infrared emission from cold dust around a statistically significant sample of young brown dwarfs. The first three objects in our survey are all detected at 70\micron,…

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