Abstract Details
| Name: Jessy Jose Affiliation: IISER, Tirupati Conference ID: ASI2018_749 Title : The youngest free-floating planets: A transformative survey of nearby star forming regions with the novel W-band filter at CFHT-WIRCam Authors and Co-Authors : The CFHT W-band Consortium Abstract Type : Contributed Talk Abstract Category : Stars,ISM and the Galaxy Abstract : Low mass brown dwarfs and free-floating planets in star-forming regions are vital tracers of the low mass end of the star-formation and key analogues to exoplanets around stars. However, only a handful of objects with masses below 13 MJup are known because they are difficult to distinguish from reddened background stars using traditional methods. An efficient method of searching for these young objects is to identify them via spectral features, such as the 1.45 um H2O absorption band seen in spectra of M-L-T-Y type objects (Allers & Liu 2010). We have acquired a 1.45 um filter (W-band) with specifications appropriate to CFHT and have been using with WIRCam to survey the nearby star forming regions including, Taurus, IC 348 and Serpens, in order to detect the lowest mass components of these regions. By combining imaging from our W-band filter with broad band J and H photometry, we create a reddening-insensitive Q-parameter, which can be used to estimate the spectral types. Because [1.45] is sensitive to H2O absorption, our method of photometric selection greatly reduces contamination by reddened background stars which plague broad-band only surveys. We have pursued spectroscopic follow-up of the W-band selected candidates, combining observations taken with IRTF-SpeX, Palomar-Triplespec, and Gemini-GNIRS. Our survey has already doubled the number of low mass objects known in Taurus, with the latest of these likely to be planetary mass. These observations of new low mass objects will provide an even lower log-g extension to the INT-G / VL-G gravity classification sequence and will constrain the very low mass end of the initial mass function down to masses of 3-5 MJup. Our survey is sensitive down to 5 Mjup objects (and down to 2-3 MJup in non-extincted portions) and is the largest deep near-IR search for young brown dwarfs and free-floating planets conducted to date and will be potentially transformative for this field. |