The Brown Dwarf Kinematics Project (BDKP). III. Parallaxes for 70 ultracool dwarfs

Abstract

We report parallax measurements for 70 ultracool dwarfs (UCDs) including 11 late-M, 32 L, and 27 T dwarfs. In this sample, 14 M and L dwarfs exhibit low surface gravity features, 6 are close binary systems, and 2 are metal-poor subdwarfs. We combined our new measurements with 114 previously published UCD parallaxes and optical-mid-IR photometry to examine trends in spectral-type/absolute magnitude, and color-color diagrams. We report new polynomial relations between spectral type and MJHK . Including resolved L/T transition binaries in the relations, we find no reason to differentiate between a "bright" (unresolved binary) and a "faint" (single source) sample across the L/T boundary. Isolating early T dwarfs, we find that the brightening of T0-T4 sources is prominent in MJ where there is a [1.2-1.4]mag difference. A similar yet dampened brightening of [0.3-0.5]mag happens at MH and a plateau or dimming of [-0.2 to -0.3]mag is seen in MK . Comparison with evolutionary models that vary gravity, metallicity, and cloud thickness verifies that for L into T dwarfs, decreasing cloud thickness reproduces brown dwarf near-IR color-magnitude diagrams. However we find that a near constant temperature of 1200 ±100 K along a narrow spectral subtype of T0-T4 is required to account for the brightening and color-magnitude diagram of the L-dwarf/T-dwarf transition. There is a significant population of both L and T dwarfs which are red or potentially "ultra-cloudy" compared to the models, many of which are known to be young indicating a correlation between enhanced photospheric dust and youth. For the low surface gravity or young companion L dwarfs we find that 8 out of 10 are at least [0.2-1.0]mag underluminous in MJH and/or MK compared to equivalent spectral type objects. We speculate that this is a consequence of increased dust opacity and conclude that low surface gravity L dwarfs require a completely new spectral-type/absolute magnitude polynomial for analysis. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..