Distances, Luminosities, and Temperatures of the Coldest Known Substellar Objects

Abstract

The coolest known brown dwarfs are our best analogs to extrasolar gas-giant planets. The prolific detections of such cold substellar objects in the past two years has spurred intensive followup, but the lack of accurate distances is a key gap in our understanding. We present a large sample of precise distances based on homogeneous mid-infrared astrometry that robustly establish absolute fluxes, luminosities, and temperatures. The coolest brown dwarfs have temperatures of 400-450 K and masses ~5-20 times that of Jupiter, showing they bridge the gap between hotter brown dwarfs and gas-giant planets. At these extremes, spectral energy distributions no longer follow a simple correspondence with temperature, suggesting an increasing role of other physical parameters such as surface gravity, vertical mixing, clouds, and metallicity.

Accepted to Science, appears in Science Express. These parallax results will soon be added to the Database of Ultracool Parallaxes: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~tdupuy/plx/

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