Related papers: Brown Dwarfs: From Mythical to Ubiquitous
PPl 15 is the first object to have been confirmed as a brown dwarf by the lithium test (in 1995), though its inferred mass was very close to the substellar limit. It is a member of the Pleiades open cluster. Its position in a cluster…
We use three field L and T dwarfs which were discovered to be wide companions to known stars by the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) to derive a preliminary brown dwarf companion frequency. Observed L and T dwarfs indicate that brown…
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 occupy the important region in the mass range between stars and planets. Their existence, ambigious until only recently, and their properties give insight into stellar and planetary formation. We present statistical results of…
Brown dwarfs, which straddle the mass range between stars and planets, appear to be common both in the solar neighborhood and in star-forming regions. Their ubiquity makes the question of their origin an important one both for our…
This paper presents results of a near-infrared imaging survey for low mass stellar and substellar companions to white dwarfs. A wide field proper motion survey of 261 white dwarfs was capable of directly detecting companions at orbital…
With the discovery of the companions of 51 Peg, 55 Cnc, $\tau$ Boo, $\upsilon$ And, 70 Vir, 47 UMa, and Gl229, evolutionary and spectral models of gas giants and/or brown dwarfs with masses from 0.3 through 60 times that of Jupiter assume a…
Microlensing is sensitive to binary, brown dwarf, and planetary companions to normal stars in the Galactic bulge with separations between about 1-10 AU. The accurate, densely-sampled photometry of microlensing events needed to detect…
A long standing and unverified prediction of binary star evolution theory is the existence of a population of white dwarfs accreting from sub-stellar donor stars. Such systems ought to be common, but the difficulty of finding them, combined…
The 32 Orionis group is a co-moving group of roughly 20 young (24 Myr) M3-B5 stars 100 pc from the Sun. Here we report the discovery of its first substellar member, WISE J052857.69+090104.2. This source was previously reported to be an M…
The census of solar neighbours is still complemented by new discoveries, mainly of very low-mass, faint dwarfs, close to or within the substellar domain. These discoveries contribute to a better understanding of the field population; its…
A key outstanding question in star and planet formation is how far the initial mass function of stars and sub-stellar objects extends, and whether or not there is a cut-off at the very lowest masses. Isolated objects in the planetary-mass…
I report the results of a survey for low-mass (0.030 <~ M <~ 0.013 M_solar) brown dwarfs in the direction of the TW Hya association using 2MASS. Two late-M dwarfs show signs of low surface gravity and are strong candidates to be young,…
The Stellar Planet Survey is an ongoing astrometric search for giant planets and brown dwarfs around a sample of about 30 M-dwarfs. We have discovered several low-mass companions by measuring the motion of our target stars relative to their…
Brown dwarfs, which occupy a fuzzy gap in mass between stars and planets, appear to be common both in the solar neighborhood and in star-forming regions. Their origin is a topic of significant current interest and debate. Some astronomers…
The infrared search for substellar companions to nearby white dwarfs has been going for a little more than a decade. The most recent phase has been a wide field proper motion search carried out primarily at Steward Observatory, where we are…
"Free-floating, non-deuterium-burning, substellar objects" are isolated bodies of a few Jupiter masses found in very young open clusters and associations, nearby young moving groups and in the immediate vicinity of the Sun. They are neither…
We report the discovery of three L dwarfs in the solar vicinity within 30 parsecs. These objects were originally found as proper motion objects from a combination of R and I photographic plates measured as part of the SuperCOSMOS Sky…
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 report the results of a deep photometric search for planets and brown dwarfs in the nearby young OB Upper Scorpius association. We obtained optical (I) and near-infrared (JKs) images around nine very low-mass stars and brown dwarf member…