• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Beyond the Local Volume. I. Surface Densities of Ultracool Dwarfs in Deep HST/WFC3 Parallel Fields
  • Contributor: Aganze, Christian; Burgasser, Adam J.; Malkan, Mathew; Theissen, Christopher A.; Tejada Arevalo, Roberto A.; Hsu, Chih-Chun; Bardalez Gagliuffi, Daniella C.; Ryan, Russell E.; Holwerda, Benne
  • Published: American Astronomical Society, 2022
  • Published in: The Astrophysical Journal, 924 (2022) 2, Seite 114
  • Language: Not determined
  • DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ac35ea
  • ISSN: 0004-637X; 1538-4357
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Abstract Ultracool dwarf stars and brown dwarfs provide a unique probe of large-scale Galactic structure and evolution; however, until recently spectroscopic samples of sufficient size, depth, and fidelity have been unavailable. Here, we present the identification of 164 M7-T9 ultracool dwarfs in 0.6 deg2 of deep, low-resolution, near-infrared spectroscopic data obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) instrument as part of the WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey and the 3D-HST survey. We describe the methodology by which we isolate ultracool dwarf candidates from over 200,000 spectra, and show that selection by machine-learning classification is superior to spectral index-based methods in terms of completeness and contamination. We use the spectra to accurately determine classifications and spectrophotometric distances, the latter reaching to ∼2 kpc for L dwarfs and ∼400 pc for T dwarfs.
  • Access State: Open Access