Title: The Missing Members of Nearby Young Associations
Abstract: I will present the latest developments in the search for members of young stellar associations in the Solar neighborhood, within 150 parsecs of the Sun. I will discuss the nature of these sparse and nearby associations and their utility as age-calibrating benchmarks, and present methods for identifying their members. I will detail recent efforts to identify their substellar members, some of which have model-dependent masses estimated to be as low as ~8 times that of Jupiter. Such low-mass objects not in orbit around a star have similar properties to non-irradiated gas giant exoplanets, and provide a unique opportunity to characterize their atmospheres at unprecedented resolutions and signal-to-noise ratios. In a second part, I will show how the recent Data Release 2 of the ESO Gaia mission is strongly impacting our understanding of the Solar neighborhood, including nearby young associations. I will talk about on-going projects to discover and characterize the low-mass stars of these young associations based on Gaia, down to the brown dwarf mass regime.
TSI Seminars take place weekly during the Fall and Winter terms. TSI seminars are intended to be accessible to scientists from the entire breadth of backgrounds at TSI, including, Physics, Planetary Science, Geology, Atmospheric Science, and Astrobiology. Our seminar series is partially funded by the Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ).