I'm studying brown dwarfs at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and at the Observatoire de Strasbourg, France. These compact objects are not massive enough to sustainably burn hydrogen, so that they cool and dim with time. The first brown dwarfs have been discovered only 20 years ago when larger infrared detectors (1–2.5µm) became available.
Since then, brown dwarfs have been discovered in very different flavours: from population (thin disk, old disk, and star-forming regions; free-floating, as companions to stars -rarely though- or in binaries); effective temperatures (from ~3000K to ~300K); gravities or atmospheric dust content and properties. Some show signs of photometric variability or polarisation; some young ones have circumstellar disks.
In the pages accessible from the links in the left column, you can read information about my research related to some of the topics mentioned above. |