Related papers: The L to T Dwarf Transition
Significant populations of field L and T dwarfs are now known, and we anticipate the discovery of even cooler dwarfs by Spitzer and ground-based infrared surveys. However, as the number of known L and T dwarfs increases so does the range in…
We present the first results from applying the spectral inversion technique in the cloudy L dwarf regime. Our new framework provides a flexible approach to modelling cloud opacity which can be built incrementally as the data requires, and…
Observational facilities allow now the detection of optical and IR spectra of young M- and L-dwarfs. This enables empirical comparisons with old M- and L- dwarfs, and detailed studies in comparison with synthetic spectra. While classical…
Most directly imaged giant exoplanets are fainter than brown dwarfs with similar spectra. To explain their relative underluminosity unusually cloudy atmospheres have been proposed. However, with multiple parameters varying between any two…
High-resolution imaging has revealed an unusually high binary fraction amongst objects spanning the transition between the L dwarf and T dwarf spectral classes. In an attempt to reproduce and unravel the origins of this apparent binary…
Over a large range of equilibrium temperatures, clouds shape the transmission spectrum of hot Jupiter atmospheres, yet their composition remains unknown. Recent observations show that the Kepler lightcurves of some hot Jupiters are…
In this brief contribution, I touch on a subset of recent efforts in spectral and opacity modeling aimed at improving our understanding of brown dwarfs, L dwarfs, and T dwarfs. I discuss theoretical calculations of the alkali line profiles,…
Wetting transitions have been predicted and observed to occur for various combinations of fluids and surfaces. This paper describes the origin of such transitions, for liquid films on solid surfaces, in terms of the gas-surface interaction…
We examine the observational consequences of the two possible origins for irregular galaxies: formation from collapse of a primordial cloud of gas early in the age of the Universe, and formation from tidal tails in an interaction that could…
The last few years has seen a dramatic increase in the number of exoplanets known and in the range of methods for characterising their atmospheric properties. At the same time, new discoveries of increasingly cooler brown dwarfs have pushed…
We present an analysis of the 0.95-14.5 micron spectral energy distributions of nine field ultracool dwarfs with spectral types ranging from L1 to T4.5. Effective temperatures, gravities, and condensate cloud sedimentation efficiencies are…
Luhman and collaborators recently discovered an early-T dwarf companion to the G0 dwarf star HN Peg, using Spitzer Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) images. Companionship was established on the basis of the common proper motion inferred from…
The L/T transition is a critical evolutionary stage for brown dwarfs and self-luminous giant planets. L/T transition brown dwarfs are more likely to be spectroscopically variable, and their high-amplitude variability probes distributions in…
We study the static and dynamic properties of liquid silica over a wide range of temperature T and density using computer simulations. The results reveal a change in the potential energy landscape as T decreases that underlies a transition…
A subgroup of dwarf galaxies have characteristics of a possible evolutionary transition between star-forming systems and dwarf ellipticals. These systems host significant starbursts in combination with smooth, elliptical outer envelopes and…
A local property of standard cosmology - growth of primordial perturbations - implies at least six different formation mechanisms of dwarf galaxies. A global property - the topology of the Universe - may enable direct observational study of…
Planetary material accreted by white dwarfs provides unique insights regarding exoplanetary composition. The evolutionary pathways of planetary bodies around white dwarfs are crucial to understanding the presence of close-in planetary…
By generalizing the theory of convection to any type of thermal and compositional source terms (diabatic processes), we show that thermohaline convection in Earth oceans, fingering convection in stellar atmospheres, and moist convection in…
Understanding the transition to turbulence has been impeded by a modeling oversight
We fit archival near-infrared spectra of 305 brown dwarfs with atmosphere models from the Sonora and Phoenix groups. Using the parameters of the best-fit models as estimates for the physical properties of the brown dwarfs in our sample, we…