Talk abstract

It is now apparent that proto-stellar -like outflow activity extends to the brown dwarf (BD) mass regime. Indeed 2MASS1207-3932, the lowest mass galactic object known to drive a jet, is only ∼ 24 Jupiter masses. The strong connection between accretion and outflow activity is now well accepted therefore it it not surprising that an actively accreting BD can drive a jet. However a detailed study of the properties of such jets can be used to better understand accretion activity and thus can contribute to the debate on BD formation mechanisms. In particular it is important to know how the mass ejection to accretion rate in BDs compares to that measured in low mass stars. Results presented in Whelan et al. 2009 for the BD jets observed to date suggest that this could be much higher for BDs. In addition, observations of episodic outflow activity in low mass stars have been used to infer episodic accretion. Early observations hint that BD jets also demonstrate such episodic behaviour. In the last 5 years we have been leading a project to search for and better understand BD optical jets. In this talk we will summarise our results to date and discuss their relevance to the debate on brown dwarf formation. At present the main focus of this work is to constrain the mass ejection to accretion rate and to extend the observations to other wavelength regimes e.g. near infrared through observations with state of the art instruments like XSHOOTER on the VLT.