AAS Meeting #193 - Austin, Texas, January 1999
Session 81. L Dwarfs, Brown Dwarfs, Infrared AGNs and Rare Objects from 2MASS
Special, Oral, Friday, January 8, 1999, 10:00-11:30am, Room 6 (A and B)

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[81.05] The Substellar Mass Function after 2MASS

I. N. Reid (Caltech)

Follow-up optical and near-infrared observations of extremely red sources from the initial scans of the near-infrared 2MASS survey have produced a bumper crop of isolated low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. As yet, few of these very low-mass (VLM) dwarfs have direct parallax measurements. However, since these sources were identified using well-defined selection criteria, we can compare the observations against predictions based on evolutionary models of VLM dwarfs. This talk describes how the observed surface densities as a function of temperature can be used to constrain the form of the mass function below 0.1 solar masses.


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