Atmospheric Modeling of Brown Dwarfs With PICASO, SONORA, and JWST​ Skip to main content
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2024 Abstracts

Atmospheric Modeling of Brown Dwarfs With PICASO, SONORA, and JWST​

Authors: Brayden Roberts, Joshua Lothringer, Denise Stephens
Mentors: Joshua Lothringer
Insitution: Utah Valley University

We present theoretical model fits to the spectra of two complex cloudy L-type brown dwarfs, VHS 1256b (L8) and J0624 (L5). Using the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), we get the complete spectra from 0.6-28 microns. We first fit the data using two forward model grids from the Sonora group to estimate the temperature and cloud properties of our object. Then, we apply a modified retrieval fitting code called PICASO, to make more complex fits to our observations. We conclude that forward models struggle to accurately fit our objects, while PICASO’s complex modeling can help us better understand what physics and chemistry could be lacking from our forward models.