Detection and characterization of M-L-T-Y dwarfs belonging to the Milky Way Disks and Stellar Halo with the Roman Space Telescope

TL;DR

This paper proposes using the Roman Space Telescope's High Latitude Survey to identify and analyze ultracool dwarfs in the Milky Way, aiming to understand their distribution, structure, and implications for galaxy formation.

Contribution

It introduces a machine learning-based photometric typing method for Roman data and demonstrates its potential to model the Milky Way's low-mass stellar populations and structure.

Findings

Photometric typing accuracy within two subtypes.

Modeling of Milky Way's disk and halo components using ultracool dwarfs.

Estimation of the low-mass end of the Galaxy-wide IMF.

Abstract

How many low-mass stars, brown dwarfs and free-floating planets are in the Milky Way? And how are they distributed in our Galaxy? Recent studies of Milky Way interlopers in high-redshift observations have revealed a 150-300 pc thick disk of these cool stars with 7% of the M-dwarfs in an oblate stellar halo. One can use the High Latitude Survey with the Roman Space Telescope to search for Galactic ultracool dwarfs (spectral classes M, L, T, and Y) to accurately model the 3D structure and the temperature and chemical evolution of the Milky Way disk in these low-mass (sub)stellar objects. Accurate typing has been shown to work on HST grism and photometric data using machine learning techniques. Such an approach can also be applied to Roman photometry, producing accurate photometric typing to within two subtypes. The High Latitude Survey provides enough statistical power to model the Milky Way structural components (thin and thick disks and halo) for M-, L- and T/Y-dwarfs. This approach has the benefit to allow us to constrain scale-lengths, scale-heights and densities, as well as the relative position of our Sun with respect to the disk of dwarf stars of our Milky Way. The total number of each brown dwarf type can be used to infer both the low-mass end of the Galaxy-wide Initial Mass Function (IMF) for the first time, the formation history of low-mass stellar and substellar objects, and the fraction of low-mass stars in the halo, a statistic that can test cold dark matter structure formation theories.