Searching for Optical Outflows Driven by Young Brown Dwarfs with the ESO UV-Visual Echelle Spectrometer UVES

Abstract

Here we discuss our work to date on the topic of outflows driven by young brown dwarfs. Soon after the discovery of large numbers of young brown dwarfs in star forming regions it became apparent that many of these sub‐stellar objects were accreting and had accretion disks, analogous to the T Tauri stars. As outflow activity in low mass protostars is strongly connected to accretion it was reasonable to expect these accreting brown dwarfs to also be driving outflows. In the last three years we have searched for brown dwarf outflows using high quality optical spectra obtained with UVES on the VLT and the technique of spectro‐astrometry. To date we have uncovered 5 brown dwarf outflows. Here we discuss our method and outline our results to date. The long‐term aim of this work is to make a comprehensive comparison between proto‐stellar outflows and those driven by sub‐stellar mass objects.