WirCam

Speaker: Estelle Moraux

WIRCam is the new wide-field (20'x20') infrared imaging facility at CFHT (first offered to the community in 2006A), and represents a great opportunity for cool star science. Two projects in this area are led by people from Grenoble, France.

The first one is a relatively shallow J-band survey (J=20.5) of a wide area (165 sq degrees) which will be combined to z'-band imaging from the CFHTLS Very Wide survey to search for cooler brown dwarfs than currently known. This choice maximizes the volume in which candidates are searched (several Y dwarfs and as many as 80 cool T dwarfs are expected to be found), and it simultaneously ensures that they will be bright enough for spectroscopy. Those spectra will provide the first insight into the physical properties of a new kind of star.

The second project I will describe is a deep zYJHK and CH4 survey (J=22) of star forming regions to search for very low mass brown dwarfs and Isolated Planetary Mass Objects (IPMOs) in the range from 1 to 30 Jupiter masses. The results will yield the first complete determination of the IMF between a few Jupiter masses and a few solar masses, thus providing a unique test to recent theories aiming at explaining the formation of stars, brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects. I shall present preliminary results obtained in the rho-Oph region.