Brown Dwarfs and Planets with Kepler and K2

Wed, December 09, 2015

Cips seminar image for website

While we know of thousands of brown dwarfs, only a handful have measured masses and radii. These  are typically younger or hotter than the field brown dwarf population, complicating efforts to understand the physical properties of field brown dwarfs for which atmospheric characterization is relatively simple. I will present an analysis of Spitzer and Kepler data of LHS 6343 C, the first non-inflated brown dwarf with a measured mass, radius, and luminosity, enabling the first test of brown evolutionary models on the mass-radius-luminosity plane. I will then describe our program to detect and characterize transiting planets and brown dwarfs, especially around M dwarf hosts, in the extended Kepler mission, K2.