Shanghai Astronomical Observatory Astrophysics Colloquium

Title：Brown Dwarfs: Bridging Stars and Planets

Speaker：Prof. Rafael Rebolo (IAC, Spain)

Special Time：10:00 AM, Wednesday, May 20th

Tencent Meeting: 101-319-078

Location: Lecture Hall, 3rd floor

Abstract：

Brown dwarfs occupy the boundary between stars and planets. Too low in mass to sustain stable hydrogen fusion, these substellar objects remained hypothetical until the discovery of Teide 1 in 1995 in the Canary islands observatories. Their discovery opened an entirely new field of astrophysics.

This colloquium reviews the development of substellar astronomy over the past three decades, from the confirmation of brown dwarfs and the development of the Lithium Test to the discovery of free-floating planetary-mass objects, substellar binaries, disks, and ultracool atmospheres. The talk will also explore how brown dwarfs have become key laboratories for exoplanet atmospheric physics and comparative planetology. Plans for detection of planetary systems in brown dwarfs will be also addressed. Finally, recent advances from infrared facilities at JWST and the Euclid space mission will be discussed, highlighting how modern surveys are revealing a vast hidden population of faint objects that populate the Galaxy between stars and planets.

CV：

Prof. Rafael Rebolo is a Full Professor at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Spain, and an External Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. He served as Director General of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) from 2013 to 2024. His research spans observational cosmology, stellar and substellar physics, exoplanets, and astronomical instrumentation, and he is the author of over 600 scientific publications. He is a Co-Investigator for the ESA space missions Planck and Euclid, Co-Principal Investigator of the ESPRESSO ultra-stable spectrograph at the VLT (ESO), and co-discoverer of the first brown dwarfs, as well as giant and terrestrial exoplanets. PI of the CELESTE technology program. He is a recipient of the Spanish National Research Prize in Physical Sciences, the Jules Janssen Prize (France), and the Canary Islands Research Prize.