Physics & Astronomy Daniella Bardalez Gagliuffi, American Museum of Natural History: “Identifying Observational Signatures of Brown Dwarf and Giant Planet Formation”

Brown dwarfs are the critical link between the products of stellar and planetary formation pathways; hence, their population properties and compositions can inform on the likelihood of either formation history. In particular, multiplicity is a direct outcome of formation, yet it is challenging to measure it in a consistent way, since each binary detection technique is sensitive to a different range of separations and mass ratios.

In this talk, I will present results from a volume-limited spectroscopic sample, including a new binary fraction straddling the hydrogen-burning minimum mass, which separates stars from brown dwarfs. I will discuss future directions for a comprehensive characterization of both the statistical distributions of the population of multiple systems and the fundamental properties of their individual components as a function of age. These are crucial steps to identify spectroscopic signatures of formation.