Brown dwarfs are the latest discovered population on the HR diagram. They formed like stars but appearing like gaseous planets, thus bridging the gap between stars and planets. I will briefly introduce the research history of brown dwarfs and summarize the properties of known brown dwarfs. Then, I will explain the new discovered substellar transition zone formed by transitional brown dwarfs, and discuss the difference between brown dwarfs and exoplanets. At the end, I will show some discoveries of new L subdwarfs from Gaia.
BIO
ZengHua Zhang has been working on brown dwarfs since 2006 during his MSc at Yunnan Observatories. Zenghua went to the UK for his PhD at the University of Hertfordshire in 2008. He moved to Spain as an IAC fellow at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands in 2013. Then he went to France as a PSL fellow at the Paris Observatory in 2017. Zenghua is an associate professor at the School of Astronomy of Nanjing University since Dec 2019.
Host: Sharon Xuesong Wang
