Joe Filippazzo edited untitled.tex  almost 10 years ago

Commit id: 3943bff55376f677ba584dae8fdeef34d6093453

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Unable to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores due to insufficient mass, all brown dwarfs are about the radius of Jupiter, emit primarily in the infrared, and are degenerate across effective temperature, mass and radius. These observational challenges make stellar direct detection methods such as interferometry and asteroseismology unfeasible and dynamical mass measurements very difficult for a large number of objects. However, with the groundswell of optical and near-infrared (NIR) spectra in recent years from the BDNYC Data Archive  combined with mid-infrared data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE; Wright et al. 2010) and the Spitzer Space Telscope (Fazio et al. 2004; Houck et al. 2004), we construct 175  near-complete spectral energy distributions (SED) for the entire sequence of late-M, L and T dwarfs. Objects with optical signatures of youth ($\beta$ or $\gamma$; Cruz et al. 2009) or membership in nearby young (10-150 Myr) moving groups (Reidel et al. in prep) are identified as 24 percent of the sample  to investigate the effects of low surface gravity on spectral morphology. We then determine bolometric luminosities for our sample by integration of the SEDs, flux calibrated using parallax measurements from the Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (Faherty et al. 2009) 2012)  and a supplement of the literature (Dupuy et al. 2013, Tinney et al. 2003, Vrba et al. 2004) or  published kinematic distances (). (Cruz et al. 2003/2007, Faherty et al. 2009, Schmidt et al. 2006/2010, Reid et al. 2006, Delorme et al. 2012, Naud et al. 2014).