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M. W. McElwain, A. J. Burgasser (UCLA), J. D. Kirkpatrick (IPAC)
We use the 3-m GEMINI instrument on the Lick telescope to identify T dwarfs (methane-bearing brown dwarfs) in the Northern Hemisphere which were detected by 2MASS. By surveying a large area of sky accessible from Lick and not yet examined for T dwarfs in previous work and expanding our color selection, we hope to add at least ten new discoveries to the 30 currently known members of this new spectral class. This work will greatly add to our understanding of this cool class of brown dwarfs, provide better statistics for the derivation of the field substellar mass function, and potentially uncover unique members and/or objects later than type T. We present the first T dwarf discovered by this program, 2MASS 0516-04, and the potentially metal-poor T dwarf, 2MASS 0937+2931. This search is being funded by the Space Telescope Science Institute Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mcelwain@astro.ucla.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.