2007-08-03

brown dwarfs have higher proper motions than quasars!

Stop the presses! No, seriously, I showed today that I can measure the faint, very red sources in the SDSS Southern Stripe—sources so red that they must either be brown dwarfs or high-redshift quasars—with enough accuracy that I can separate them with some reliability on the basis of proper motion alone. The separation is not perfect, because there are some faint brown dwarfs with very small proper motions. However, the most widely separated brown dwarfs are also the most interesting, because they have the highest probabilities of being very low luminosity and therefore old and cold.

In other news, Lang, Mierle, and Roweis worked all night and got the first astrometry.net paper submitted.

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