Brown Dwarfs with Gaia

The Gaia project is making an all-sky astrometric survey.

As part of the Gaia data release 3 during summer 2022 astrometric accelerations will become available for the first time. This will enable an entirely new route to identify brown dwarfs and planets.

The follow-up both using archival and new data will be concerned with the identification, characterisation and constraints on orbital parameters. This study will be part of the wider follow-up effort identifying new brown dwarfs and taking follow-up spectra.

Spectra for all brown dwarfs in Gaia can be used along with kinematic information from Gaia to interpret their chemical compositions and ages.

These will be used alongside the Gaia information in particular also low resolution spectra which is envisaged as a possible data product in future data releases.

Scientific exploitation of the Gaia sample will enable a much more secure understanding of brown dwarfs and may include derivation of the local luminosity and mass function, characterisation of benchmarks and correlations analyses of physical parameters such as age/mass with photometric/spectroscopic features.

This project is envisaged to include the student becoming a member of the Gaia consortium and also being concerned with the data quality produced for future Gaia data releases.