Measuring physical properties of very young brown dwarfs

✍ Scribed by G. Basri

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 109 KB
• Volume: 327
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-6337
• DOI: 10.1002/asna.200510483

✦ Synopsis

I discuss the problem of finding the fundamental parameters (mass, temperature, gravity, radius, and age) of ultra low-mass objects when they are very young. This is the part of parameter space where theoretical evolutionary models, which typically are used to extract the difficult parameters of age, mass, and radius from more observationally direct parameters like luminosity and spectral type, are expected to be least reliable. Studying binaries is one way to get around this problem; determining fundamental parameters from high resolution spectra is another (which is applicable to single stars). All these methods have their advantages and problems, and it is essential to make comparisons between them to develop trust in any of their answers.