Astron. Astrophys. 351, L5-L9 (1999)

5. Conclusions

Coming after the recent discoveries of DENIS-P J1228.2-1547 (Delfosse et al. 1997), Kelu 1 (Ruiz et al. 1997), LP 944-20 (Tinney 1998) and of field brown dwarfs found by 2MASS (Kirkpatrick et al. 1999), the identification of EROS-MP J0032-4405 in a small surveyed volume again indicates that brown dwarfs are quite common in the solar neighbourhood. This should not come as a surprise, since the mass function of the Pleiades cluster (Bouvier et al. 1998; Zapatero Osorio et al. 1999) rises mildly into the brown dwarf domain.

EROS 2 combined with DENIS has proved their capabilities to find L dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood. We are currently analysing a larger area with three epochs and a longer time baseline. This will allow us to relax the requirement of a detection in the two colour channels, and provide more accurate proper motions. We therefore hope to find new, cooler objects, and to further characterize the brown dwarf population of the solar neighbourhood.

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1999

Online publication: November 2, 1999
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