Searching for young brown dwarfs in the IC348 cluster
- Author:
- Hapich, Charles Jeffrey
- Published:
- [University Park, Pennsylvania] : Pennsylvania State University, 2020.
- Physical Description:
- 1 electronic document
- Additional Creators:
- Luhman, Kevin and Schreyer Honors College
Access Online
- honors.libraries.psu.edu , Connect to this object online.
- Restrictions on Access:
- Open Access.
- Summary:
- 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 HSTs 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.
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- Dissertation Note:
- B.S. Pennsylvania State University 2020.
- Technical Details:
- The full text of the dissertation is available as an Adobe Acrobat .pdf file ; Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view the file.
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