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Using Gaia Astrometry to Anchor Parallaxes for Nearby Brown Dwarfs

Presentation #301.02 in the session “How Gaia Reveals the Galaxy’s Secrets: Results Local to the Sun”.

Published onJun 01, 2021
Using Gaia Astrometry to Anchor Parallaxes for Nearby Brown Dwarfs

The coldest brown dwarfs are invisible to Gaia because of their intrinsic faintness shortward of 1 micron. Nonetheless, Gaia astrometry is vital to the success of ongoing astrometric follow-up of L, T, and Y dwarfs. In this talk, I discuss our use of astrometry obtained from a variety of different spacecraft — the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and the Hubble Space Telescope — to measure accurate parallaxes, with Gaia positions of random field stars anchoring the common reference frame. A couple of science highlights include the identification of the most enigmatic brown dwarf discovered so far, along with the measurement of the substellar mass function using the 20-pc census.

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