The Bottom of the Main Sequence — And Beyond
Proceedings of the ESO Workshop Held in Garching, Germany, 10–12 August 1994
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Beschreibung
This is a complete overview of the state of the art in the study of very-low-mass stars, particularly brown dwarfs. It covers observations as well as modelling techniques, especially addressing the current status of our theoretical understanding of these objects, and the relation of observed luminosity and mass functions to star formation. Besides the problems of clustering, surface activity, and current estimates of the mass density in low-mass stars, the reader will also learn how many bona fide brown dwarfs have been unambigously detected so far.
The proceedings of this workshop should probably be prefaced with a few words on some of the more confusing jargon. The phrases "Very Low-Mass star" , "VLM star", or simply "VLM" are now used fairly uniformly by as tronomers studying the stars at the bottom of the hydrogen-burning stellar main sequence - unfortunately, however, there is no clear definition as to what constitutes a VLM star. The reader should be warned that VLM stars are variously considered to be stars with; masses less than 0.3M ; masses 0 less than 0.1M ; spectra later than about M6-7; luminosities fainter than 0 Mv = 15; or luminosities fainter than Mbol = 12. The important features of a VLM star, however, would seem to be (1) that it is about as faint as a star can be, and (2) that it still remains a star (ie. it still burns hydrogen) . All of the above criteria, therefore, would seem to qualify an object as a VLM star, and requiring a more stringent definition is probably quibbling.
This is a complete overview of the state of the art in the study of very-low-mass stars, particularly brown dwarfs. Covering observations as well as modelling techniques the book addresses astronomers and astrophysicists as well as researchers and graduate students.
Autor*in
Christopher G. Tinney
Themen in »The Bottom of the Main Sequence — And Beyond«
Main sequence cluster clustering density gravitation gravity photometry planet spectroscopy star star formation stars white dwarf