Topic: Astronomy Without A Telescope – Brown Dwarfs Are Magnetic Too.

[sam]

I feel a certain empathy for brown dwarfs. The first confirmed finding of one was only fifteen years ago and they remain frequently overlooked in most significant astronomical surveys. I mean OK, they can only (stifles laughter) burn deuterium but that's something, isn't it?

http://www.universetoday.com/2010/07/17/astronomy-without-a-telescope-brown-dwarfs-are-magnetic-too/


-- interestingly I looked at observing the magnetic field of L and T dwarf brown dwarfs, we detected 1 out of 10 I observed... some 100 hours of observing time with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope in India.

[Clive]

What an excellent article Sam.  Very good graphic too which helps put the size of these objects into perspective.  Very interesting to learn that you have done some work in this  area and that they allowed you 100 hours observing time on the GMRT.  That seems very impressive!  Would you get that sort of time allocation on one of the giant optical telescopes? 

[sam]

probably not, but then you'd probably not need that time. We were looking for very faint emission, still only detected it from 1 source. 100 hours with the GMRT is indeed impressive, especially as the principle investigator as a graduate student - that reminds me I should bug my collaborator for comments on it. Still it wasn't the most important part of my thesis... that was the hunting for exoplanets / low frequency galaxies.