Bibcode
Bouvier, Jerome; Stauffer, John; Martin, Eduardo
Referencia bibliográfica
ASP Conf. Ser. 154, The Tenth Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and the Sun, Edited by R. A. Donahue and J. A. Bookbinder, p.1828
Fecha de publicación:
0
1998
Número de citas
0
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
We have used the CFHT 8K x 8K mosaic CCD camera to survey 2.5 square
degrees of the Pleiades in R and I to detection limits of about R ~24
and I ~23. This is the deepest, widest area survey for brown dwarfs in
the Pleiades conducted to date, covering of order 10% of the effective
surface area of the cluster to a sensitivity limit which should allow
detection of Pleiades age brown dwarfs to about 0.03 solar mass if the
theoretical models are approximately correct. The bright limit for our
survey, set by the magnitude where stars saturate in our I band images,
corresponds to about 0.12 solar mass at Pleiades age. Of the ~100,000
objects detected in our survey area, we identify sixteen stars as
forming a Pleiades brown dwarf sequence in our I vs. R-I color-magnitude
diagram. These brown dwarf candidates have I magnitudes ranging from
~17.8 to I ~20, and inferred masses from the hydrogen burning mass limit
to about 0.04 or 0.05 Msun. Below I = 20, we no longer see an
identifiable locus of Pleiades members in the CM diagram either because
few or no objects of this mass formed or because the R-I colors of
Pleiades age brown dwarfs change abruptly (grain formation?) at this
mass. In any event, by surveying a statistically significant fraction of
the Pleiades to very deep limits, we estimate that brown dwarfs are
unlikely to compose more than about 2% of the total mass of the
Pleiades. If most stars in the galactic disk form in rich clusters, this
suggests that brown dwarfs also comprise only a very small fraction of
the mass of the disk.