Brown dwarfs in the Pleiades cluster: Clues to the substellar mass function ,

By E. Moraux, J. Bouvier, J. Stauffer, J-C. Cuillandre Laog, Grenoble, France., Caltech, Pasadena, Cfht, Hawaii. 2002

136 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the results of a 6.4 square degrees imaging survey of the Pleiades cluster in the I and Z-bands. The survey extends up to 3 degrees from the cluster center and is 90% complete down to I � 22. It covers a mass range from 0.03 Mto 0.48 Mand yields 40 brown dwarf candidates (BDCs) of which 29 are new. The spatial distribution of BDCs is fitted by a King profile in order to estimate the cluster substellar core radius. The Pleiades mass function is then derived accross the stellar-substellar boundary and we find that, between 0.03 Mand 0.48 M� , it is well represented by a single power-law, dN/dM ∝ M −α , with an index α = 0.60 ±0.11. Over a larger mass domain, however, from 0.03 Mto 10 M� , the mass function is better fitted by a log-normal function. We estimate that brown dwarfs represent about 25% of the cluster population which nevertheless makes up less than 1.5% of the cluster mass. The early dynamical evolution of the cluster appears to have had little effect on its present mass distribution at an age of 120 Myr. Comparison between the Pleiades mass function and the Galactic field mass function suggests that apparent differences may be mostly due to unresolved binary systems.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f723abcd6acd296a5ffc90df1a2411ba8ad9fb82

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• Galactic Stellar and Substellar Initial Mass Function (2003, methodology): “…the MF obtained for the Pleiades, from various observed LFs covering a significant fraction of the cluster area (Hambly et al. 1999, Dobbie et al. 2002b, Moraux et al. 2003), using the BCAH98 and Chabrier et al. (2000) models, which accurately reproduce the observed magnitude-color diagrams.”
• How Dry is the Brown Dwarf Desert? Quantifying the Relative Number of Planets, Brown Dwarfs, and Stellar Companions around Nearby Sun-like Stars (2004, methodology): “For the stellar companion data, the single-lined (SB1) and double-lined (SB2) spectroscopic binary orbits are primarily from the Ninth Catalogue of Spectroscopic Binary Orbits (Pourbaix et al. 2004) with additional interferometric, astrometric or visual solutions from the 6th Catalog of Orbits of Vi”
• The Evolution of L and T Dwarfs in Color-Magnitude Diagrams (2008, background): “Deep surveys have established that its low-mass stellar and substellar population can be reproduced by a power-law IMF with an index of 0:6 (Moraux et al. 2003; Bihain et al. 2006).”
• The Formation and Early Evolution of Low-Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs (2012, background): “The Pleiades has been searched extensively for brown dwarfs since those initial discoveries (Moraux et al. 2003, Stauffer et al. 2007, references therein), producing a census that extends down to L spectral types and masses of ∼ 0.025 M⊙ (e.g., Mart́ın et al. 1998).”
• A Census of the Young Cluster IC 348 (2003, methodology): “The transmission profile for the Z filter is described by Moraux et al. (2003).”
• The Brown Dwarf Desert at 75-1200 AU (2004, background): “While recent searches have detected numerous brown dwarfs in the field (e.g., Kirkpatrick et al. 2000) and in clusters (e.g., Moraux et al. 2003), very few companions to stars have been found with masses in the substellar range between 12 and 75 MJ. 3 Brown dwarf companions can be detected either…”
• A Universal Stellar Initial Mass Function? A critical look at variations in extreme environments (2010, background): “Moraux et al. (2003) present a comprehensive study of the cluster IMF down to 0.03 M⊙ and find the results consistent with a log–normal form over a broad mass range (0.03–10 M⊙): mc = 0.25 M⊙ with σlogm = 0.52, and a marginally steeper (Γ = 1.7) than Salpeter slope above 1.5 M⊙; cf. Bouvier et al.…”