Search

In star-forming regions, the low-mass brown dwarfs and free-floating planets are vital tracers of the low mass end of star formation and are key analogues to exoplanets around stars. The complete census of a star-forming cloud, to masses well below the deuterium-burning limit, will also constrain the very low-mass end of the IMF. Our team surveys various nearby young star-forming regions in the solar neighborhood like Taurus, Serpens, IC348 etc. in search of brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects using a novel and robust technique which photometrically identifies these ultra cool objects. Here we present the study of one such nearby young star-forming region, Sigma Orionis located at a distance of ~400pc with very low extinction (AvJup. This shows that with our novel approach we can efficiently identify low-mass objects. Studying these brown dwarfs enables us to probe the IMF down to the sub-stellar regime and aid in understanding their formation mechanism in one of the well-known young clusters in the solar neighborhood for the first time. Our study explores the potential environmental influence on the brown dwarf formation scenario by performing a comparative analysis with the nearby well-studied star-forming regions., {"references":["Caballero, J. A., (2018), Geosciences, 8, 362","Offner, S. S. R. et al. (2014), Protostars and Planets VI. Univ. Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, p. 53","Salpeter, E. E. (1955), ApJ, 121, 161","Bastian, N. et al. (2010), ARA&A, 48, 339","Allers, K. N., & Liu, M. C. (2013), ApJ, 772, 79","Allers K. N., Liu M. C. (2020), arXiv e-prints, p. ArXiv:2008.00010","Jose, J. et al. (2020), ApJ, 892, 122","Dubber, S et al. (2021), MNRAS, 505, 4215","Lalchand, B. et al. (2022), AJ, 164, 125","Dubber, S et al. (2023), MNRAS","Hern ́andez, J. (2007), ApJ, 662, 1067","Suárez, G. (2019), MNRAS, 486, 1718","Mužić, K. et al. (2019), ApJ, 881, 79"]}