A New Population of Brown Dwarfs

Abstract

A large area deep survey for brown dwarfs from digitally stacked 1.2m Schmidt plates has revealed a population of very red stars (R-I>3). On the basis of their colours, near IR spectra and their luminosity estimates from proper motions, these objects appeared to be Brown Dwarfs. First measurements of the parallaxes of 8 of the reddest objects at the 1.5 danish telescope confirmed this, and showed that four of them have K-band luminosities some mags below the bottom of the main sequence. We present here those results.