Related papers: How do brown dwarves form?
Dozens of planets and brown dwarfs are known to orbit one component of tight stellar binaries ($a_{\rm bin} \lesssim 20$ au), despite circumstellar discs in such systems being truncated to radii of only $\sim (0.2-5)$ au. This presents a…
The large scale structure of a brown dwarf atmosphere is determined by an interplay of convection, radiation, dust formation, and gravitational settling, which possibly provides an explanation for the observed variability. The result is an…
Planets are born from the gas and dust discs surrounding young stars. Energetic radiation from the central star can drive thermal outflows from the discs atmospheres, strongly affecting the evolution of the discs and the nascent planetary…
Recent direct imaging discoveries suggest a new class of massive, distant planets around A stars. These widely separated giants have been interpreted as signs of planet formation driven by gravitational instability, but the viability of…
The formation of low-mass protostars and especially of brown dwarfs currently are ``hot topics'' in cool star research. The talks contributed to this splinter session discussed how low in mass and how low in luminosity objects might exist,…
Theory and simulations suggest that it is possible to form low-mass hydrogen-burning stars, brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects via disc fragmentation. As disc fragmentation results in the formation of several bodies at comparable…
Context: We studied numerically the formation of giant planet (GP) and brown dwarf (BD) embryos in gravitationally unstable protostellar disks and compared our findings with directly-imaged, wide-orbit (>= 50 AU) companions known to-date.…
This review summarises recent observational results regarding the evolution of angular momentum and disks in brown dwarfs. The observations clearly show that brown dwarfs beyond ages of 10 Myr are exclusively fast rotators and do not spin…
We use Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics to explore the circumstances under which an isolated very-low-mass prestellar core can be formed by colliding turbulent flows and collapse to form a brown-dwarf. Our simulations suggest that the flows…
Planets have been detected around a variety of stars, including low-mass objects, such as brown dwarfs. However, such extreme cases are challenging for planet formation models. Recent sub-millimeter observations of disks around brown dwarf…
Our first aim is to calculate the minimum mass for Primary Fragmentation in a variety of potential star-formation scenarios, i.e. (i) hierarchical fragmentation of a 3-D medium; (ii) one-shot, 2-D fragmentation of a shock-compressed layer;…
Studying the earliest stages in the birth of stars is crucial for understanding how they form. Brown dwarfs with masses between that of stars and planets are not massive enough to maintain stable hydrogen-burning fusion reactions during…
Star formation is triggered in essentially three ways: (1) the pressures from existing stars collect and squeeze nearby dense gas into gravitationally unstable configurations, (2) random compression from supersonic turbulence makes new…
Several hundred stars older than 10 million years have been observed to have infrared excesses. These observations are explained by dust grains formed by the collisional fragmentation of hidden planetesimals. Such dusty planetesimal discs…
Studies of disks around young brown dwarfs are of paramount importance to our understanding of the origin, diversity and early evolution of sub-stellar objects. Here we present first results from a systematic search for disk emission in a…
The formation of planets is one of the major unsolved problems in modern astrophysics. Planets are believed to form out of the material in circumstellar disks known to exist around young stars, and which are a by-product of the star…
The protostellar outflow mechanism operates for a significant fraction of the pre-main sequence phase of a solar mass star and is thought to have a key role in star and perhaps even planet formation. This energetic mechanism manifests…
It is believed that stellar black holes (BHs) can be formed in two different ways: Either a massive star collapses directly into a BH without a supernova (SN) explosion, or an explosion occurs in a proto-neutron star, but the energy is too…
Recent observations have suggested that circumstellar disks may commonly form around young stellar objects. Although the formation of circumstellar disks can be a natural result of the conservation of angular momentum in the parent cloud,…
The formation of a star is a dynamic process fed by the gravitational collapse of a molecular cloud core. Theoretical models and observations suggest that the majority of this infalling material settles into a protoplanetary disk before…