Colors Diagnostic of Surface Gravity

The goal here is to find a prescription of colors diagnostic of brown dwarf surface gravity. Since early optical as well as far infrared spectra and photometry are uncommon, the bands of interest should only include i and z from SDSS; J, H and Ks from 2MASS; and W1, W2 and W3 (but not W4 with only 10 percent detection) from WISE.

In order to find said prescriptions, I used the BT-Settl models (at solar metallicity ranging from 1000 – 3000 K in effective temperature and 3.0 – 5.5 dex in log surface gravity) to produce a suite of color-color and color-parameter plots.

One method I employed was to choose one effective temperature (in this case 2500K) and anchor the colors in one band that doesn’t vary much between high and low surface gravity, e.g. z-band. Then I chose the other two bands by one that was more luminous at low gravity and one that was more luminous at high gravity, e.g. W2- and J-band respectively.

Then the color-color plot of these bands looks like:

In this plot of z-J vs. z-W2 the smallest circles are objects with high surface gravity and the largest have low surface gravity (log(g) = 5.5 to 3.5 respectively). The light grey lines are iso-temperature contours.

In this particular case, there is little-to-no dispersion in z-J for Teff = 2500K (d = 0.009) and an appreciable dispersion in z-W2 for that same Teff (d = 0.32). Notice the tight vertical grouping (z-J) and dispersed horizontal grouping (z-W2) for the model objects of Teff = 2500K and varying log(g) in the red rectangle on the color-color plot above.

Double-checking with the color-Teff plots, we can see that the dispersion in z-J in the plot on the left is tiny and the horizontal offset in the color-color plot is due to the 0.32 magnitude dispersion in z-W2 on the right below.

Of course this is just a different way of looking at the same thing, but I might be able to find colors that are reliable indicators of gravity (and thus age) if I can find a bunch of these examples where the flux in the secondary and tertiary bands are flipped.

Of note is the fact that at this temperature in this color-color plot the points are also isolated, i.e. there are no degeneracies with objects of any other temperature. That means that if I find an object with a z-J = 1.65 or so, I know that it has an effective temperature of about 2500K. Then I can determine its age by seeing if its z-W2 color is closer to 3.3 (young) or 2.9 (old).

This of course does not work for all temperatures, as shown in the red circle in the color-color plot above. This demonstrates a degeneracy among hotter young objects (Teff = 3000K, log(g) = 3.5) and cooler old objects (Teff = 2800K, log(g) = 5.5) with a temperature difference of 200K.

Though there is no definitive combination of colors to identify the age of an object irrespective of temperature, what I have done here is found a collection of prescriptions that are reliable indicators of age over small temperature ranges.

Spectral Energy Distributions

The goal here was to investigate the atmospheric properties of known young objects and identify new brown dwarf candidates by producing extended spectral energy distributions (SEDs).

These SEDs are constructed by combining WISE mid-infrared photometry with our extensive database of optical and near-infrared spectra and parallaxes. The BDNYC Database has about 875 objects and the number of objects with parallaxes is about 250.

My code queries the database and the parallax measurements by right ascension and declination and then identifies the matches with enough spectra and photometry to produce an SED. Next, it checks the flux and wavelength units and makes the appropriate conversions to [ergs][s-1][cm-2][cm-1] and [um] respectively.

It then runs a fitting routine across BT-Settl models of every permutation of:

• 400 K < Teff < 4500 K in 50 K increments,
• 3.0 dex < log(g) < 5.5 dex in 0.1 dex increments, and
• 0.5 M_Jup < radius < 1.3 M_Jup in 0.05 M_Jup increments.

Once the best match is found, it plots the synthetic spectrum (grey) along with the photometric points converted to flux in each SDSS, 2MASS and WISE bands (grey dots). In this manner, the fitting routine guesses the effective temperature, surface gravity and radius simultaneously.

Here are some preliminary plots: