• DOI:10.1086/312728
• Corpus ID: 33719017

The Missing Link: Early Methane ("T") Dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

@article{Leggett2000TheML,
  title={The Missing Link: Early Methane ("T") Dwarfs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.},
  author={Leggett and Geballe and Fan and Schneider and Gunn and Lupton and Knapp and Strauss and McDaniel and Golimowski and Henry and Peng and Tsvetanov and Uomoto and Zheng and Hill and Ramsey and Anderson and Annis and Bahcall and Brinkmann and Chen and Csabai and Fukugita and Hennessy and Hindsley and Ivezi{\'c} and Lamb and Munn and Pier and Schlegel and Smith and Stoughton and Thakar and York},
  journal={The Astrophysical journal},
  year={2000},
  volume={536 1},
  pages={
          L35-L38
        }
}

• Leggett, Geballe, +32 authors York
• Published 28 April 2000
• Physics
• The Astrophysical journal

We report the discovery of three cool brown dwarfs that fall in the effective temperature gap between the latest L dwarfs currently known, with no methane absorption bands in the 1-2.5 µm range, and the previously known methane (T) dwarfs, whose spectra are dominated by methane and water. The newly discovered objects were detected as very red objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data and have JHK colors between the red L dwarfs and the blue Gl 229B-like T dwarfs. They show both CO and CH(4) absorption in their near-infrared spectra in addition to H(2)O, with weaker CH(4) absorption features in the H and K bands than those in all other methane dwarfs reported to date. Due to the presence of CH(4) in these bands, we propose that these objects are early T dwarfs. The three form part of the brown dwarf spectral sequence and fill in the large gap in the overall spectral sequence from the hottest main-sequence stars to the coolest methane dwarfs currently known.