2021-02-14

red dwarf population bifurcation

My loyal reader knows that Hans-Walter Rix (MPIA) and I have been looking at the population of white dwarfs as observed by ESA Gaia. This is demonstration project; it is somewhat adjacent to our usual science. However, today he ran our white-dwarf code for the much redder stars at the bottom of the main sequence (late M and brown dwarfs) and what did he find? It looks like the main sequence splits into two branches at the lowest-mass (coldest) end. Is that a discovery or known? And who could tell us?

No comments:

Post a Comment