Franklin & Marshall College

Observational optical and NIR astronomy; brown dwarfs; star formation; binary systems

I study brown dwarfs, objects that form like stars but do not generate any new energy through nuclear fusion.  Currently I am searching for extremely cold and low-mass brown dwarfs as gravitationally bound companions to nearby stars.  Finding brown dwarfs physically associated with better understood main sequence stars allows us to determine independently the age and metallicity of the brown dwarfs.  These so-called 'benchmark' objects are used to improve the theoretical understanding of these sub-stellar objects as well as models of the star and planet formation process.