Thursday

Brown dwarfs are the link between stars and planets, with masses between 0.01 and 0.08 Msol. While massive brown dwarfs constitute the low-mass end of the stellar mass function and form like stars, the lowest mass brown dwarfs could be ejected giant planets. Understanding the origin of brown dwarfs has been one of the major motivations for recent deep studies of star forming regions as well as a driver for development of state-of-the-art simulations. Deep surveys show that brown dwarfs are an ubiquitous outcome of star formation, with about 0.2-0.5 substellar objects formed for each star, across a wide range of initial conditions and environments. The number of planetary mass brown dwarfs, however, is low, at least down to about 5 Jupiter masses. Young brown dwarfs host long-lived dusty disks, some of them with sufficient mass to form Earth-like planets. The constraints on their disks provide important context for the recent discovery of multi-planet systems around very low mass stars. In this talk, I present results from our decade-long survey program SONYC (short for Substellar Objects in Nearby Young Clusters), discuss associated observations of accretion, rotation, and disks in brown dwarfs, and show prospects for future programs with JWST and Gaia.