I heard 3000 🫠

Eventually yes, though I don't know the timeline

CORALIE has done most (all?) solar-like stars within 50pc, though most of the data isn't public

I'll finish this thread with our full model of this atmosphere -- explaining (almost) every wiggle in the data. So much brown dwarf physics & chemistry is being unveiled with JWST!

In the appendices, we also get into the weeds of the data reduction, and appendix C discusses how we deal with one of the systematic effects present in out data. Might be of interest if you are also someone who worries a lot about the precise shape of your small wiggles in your JWST spectrum.

It's still unclear whether these molecules are common in cold brown dwarfs, since JWST has better resolution and sensitivity than any other instrument at 14um (where these molecules have features). We're working on more observations, though, so watch this space!!

Second, C2H2 (acetylene): this detection is really a puzzle. Models don't predict C2H2 in a non-irradiated atmosphere like this one, and we see quite a lot of it. We speculate about possible causes for this, but don't come to a clear conclusion. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears!

First, HCN (hydrogen cyanide): this is predicted for very turbulent atmospheres with very strong gravity: in these cases the HCN can be produced deep in the atmosphere, and brought up to observable altitudes.

We modelled this spectrum using pRT retrievals (huge shout out to Paul Mollière for guiding me through this). We see H2O, NH3, CH4, as expected -- but also HCN and C2H2, which have not been seen in a brown dwarf atmosphere before. So, what do these molecules tell us about the atmospheric physics?

We collected MIRI/MRS observations, which give a beautiful spectrum from 5-18um, all at R>1000. We see so much detail from all of the molecular absorption in the atmosphere -- all those wiggles you're seeing are real atmospheric structure!

In this study we used JWST to study a cold brown dwarf binary, WISE-0458, which is around 550 Kelvin / 280 Celsius. Even though it's a binary, here we treat it as a single atmosphere, since it is barely resolved even at the shorter wavelengths: we simply combine the signal from both brown dwarfs.

just under 12 light years! This is one of the 20 closest star systems.

Wild that it's been nearly six years since we were talking about trying to do this with MagAO!