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S. J. Wolk (CfA), T. Hearty (JPL), R. Jayawardhana (Berkeley), R. Smith (CfA), R. Edgar (CfA), P. Plucinsky (CfA)
MBM 12 is a dark cloud located about 65 pc from the sun. During the late 1980's and early 1990's, five Classical T Tauri stars associated with the cloud were discovered. The co-existence of the cloud and several stars with disks implies a very young association, very close to the Earth. Such a group would be in a league with the TW Hydrae Association (Kastner et al. 1997) and Eta Cham. (Mamajek et al. 1999). However, at an estimated age of about 1 Myrs, brown dwarfs/giant planets should be brighter and disks should be more numerous in MBM12 than in these other nearby associations. Therefore MBM12 is an an excellent region to investigate the early stages of brown dwarf and giant planet formation.
Deep ROSAT images and follow up spectroscopic observations by Hearty et. al (1999) raised the cluster membership to at least 8. We have expanded on this study with deep ground-based imaging, followup spectroscopy and infrared data. We discuss our current data base of U through I observations (complete to V= 20), J through K observations (complete to K=14) and spectra of most stars above V magnitude 18. We also will discuss optical and infrared identifications of point sources discovered in recent {\em Chandra} observations.
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The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: swolk@cfa.harvard.edu