Searching for young brown dwarfs in the IC348 cluster

Open Access
- Author:
- Hapich, Charles Jeffrey
- Area of Honors:
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Kevin Luhman, Thesis Supervisor
Steinn Sigurdsson, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- brown dwarf
low mass
Hubble Space Telescope
initial mass function - Abstract:
- Populations of low-mass brown dwarfs are required for the analysis of models of both low-mass star formation and brown dwarf formation. Constraints on the Initial Mass Function (IMF), or the frequency as a function of mass, of brown dwarfs can rule out theoretical models of formation mechanisms by their predicted minimum mass. Previous surveys of brown dwarfs in star-forming regions suffer from poor sample sizes at masses ~ 5 – 10 MJup. The sensitivity of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is sufficient to detect large populations of these low-mass brown dwarfs (< 10 MJup) in nearby young star clusters. We chose the star-forming region IC348 due to its large number of known brown dwarfs and its compactness. Forty-eight positions of the outer region of the cluster were observed with HST to search for new low-mass brown dwarfs. Three of HST’s Wide-Field Camera Infrared (WFC/IR) filters were chosen: F139M, F160W, and F125W. They are able to identify brown dwarfs via methane and water vapor absorption lines. Objects in these images were identified as brown dwarf candidates by their colors using their magnitudes in the selected filters. We report approximately 10 new brown dwarf candidates in IC348, of which 4 have been selected for follow-up observation with the Gemini observatory.