* Astronomy

Young, Jupiter-Mass Objects in Ophiuchus
Authors: K. N. Allers, D. T. Jaffe, N. S. van der Bliek, F. Allard, I. Baraffe
It appeared in the proceedings of "The Spitzer Space Telescope: New Views of the Cosmos" (9-12 November 2004)
By using 3.5 to 8 micron data from the Cores to Disks (c2d) Legacy survey and their own deep IJHKs images of a 0.5 square degree portion of the c2d fields in Ophiuchus, the researchers have produced a few sample candidate young objects with probable masses between 1 - 10 Jupiter masses.
The availability of photometry over a large range where these objects emit allowed them to discriminate between young, extremely low-mass candidates and more massive foreground and background objects.
This meant that their survey would have fewer false positives than existing near-IR surveys.

The sensitive inventory of a star forming cloud from the red to the mid-IR allowed the researchers to constrain the IMF for these non-clustered star formation regions to well below the deuterium burning limit.
They hope to use the Spitzer results in combination with current disk models to learn about the presence and nature of circumstellar disks around young brown dwarfs.

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