Research Talk at Morehouse College 12 September 2014
Channel: Adam Burgasser
Date: 2014-09-12

In the past decade, developments in infrared detector technology have revealed a previously unseen population of faint, low-temperature “ultracool” dwarf stars in the immediate Solar Neighborhood. These include brown dwarfs - “failed stars” with insufficient mass to fuse hydrogen - and free-floating exoplanets - objects incapable of fusing anything. To investigate the physical properties of these objects, our group has constructed the largest library of low-resolution, near-infraed spectra ever assembled of ultracool dwarfs, and we have successfully mined this dataset to uncover several new spectral subclasses, including metal-poor subdwarfs, unresolved spectral binaries and newly-formed young planetary-mass dwarfs.  In this talk I will summarize the basic physical properties of ultracool dwarfs and how we interpret their spectra. I will then highlight work conducted by my group, including the discovery of an unusual benchmark source by UCSD-Morehouse Bridge Fellow Christian Aganze. I conclude with a brief description of the UCSD-Morehouse Bridge Program, which will induct its second class in 2015.