As one of the last large programs carried out by the Spitzer Space Telescope (Spitzer GO 14128 led by PI J. Faherty) prior to its retirement in 2020, a new survey for photometric variability in young, low-mass brown dwarfs will now pave the way for future searches for cloud-driven variability in directly-imaged exoplanets with next-generation telescopes.
Dr. Johanna Vos and a team of investigators have recently published the findings of their survey in a paper titled “Let the Great World Spin: Revealing the Stormy, Turbulent Nature of Young Giant Exoplanet Analogs with the Spitzer Space Telescope,” with promising results.
The survey detected new variable objects with a range of rotation periods and variability amplitudes, across a variety of temperatures. Blue points show the measured brightness and the pink line shows the best fit variable model.
