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D.E. Peterson (Univ. of Rochester), S.T. Megeath (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), J.L. Pipher (Univ. of Rochester), L.E. Allen, P.C. Myers (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA)
Young cluster regions are an ideal environment for identifying and studying the distribution of sub-stellar objects that populate the low mass end of the initial mass function. At extinctions less than A_V = 10, brown dwarfs have been identified in wide-field (20' x 20'), deep J-, H- and K-band images of one such cluster, the Orion Molecular Cloud 2 and 3 (OMC2/OMC3) region. We obtained these images with SQIID on the 2.1 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Potential brown dwarfs are selected by their positions on an H versus J-H color-magnitude diagram assuming an age of 1 Myr. When these candidates are then plotted on a color-color diagram, 52 candidates show non-photospheric colors similar to those found by Muench et al. (2001) in the Trapezium cluster. These colors may result from thermal emission originating in circumstellar disks surrounding the young brown dwarfs.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dawnp@astro.pas.rochester.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 34, #4
© 2002. The American Astronomical Soceity.