In 2005, Palla & Baraffe proposed that brown dwarfs and very low mass stars (<0.1 solar masses) may be unstable to radial oscillations during the pre-main-sequence deuterium burning phase. With associated oscillation periods of 1-4 hours, this potentially new class of pulsation offers unprecedented opportunities to probe the interiors and evolution of low-mass objects in the 1-15 million year age range. Furthermore, several previous reports of short-period variability have suggested that deuterium-burning pulsation is in fact at work in young clusters.
For my dissertation, I developed a...
In 2005, Palla & Baraffe proposed that brown dwarfs and very low mass stars (<0.1 solar masses) may be unstable to radial oscillations during the pre-...
