Outflow activity in brown dwarfs

While numerous studies have been aimed at understanding the properties of young brown dwarfs relatively little exploration of their potential as drivers of outflows has occurred. Forbidden emission lines are important probes of outflows from young stellar objects, as they trace the shocks which form as an outflow interacts with the ambient medium of its driving source. While forbidden emission was identified in the spectra of young brown dwarfs, indicating the presence of outflows, these lines were weak and confined to the brown dwarf continuum position. Hence their origin in an outflow could not be confirmed. Our approach to this problem, is to analyse the forbidden line regions of brown dwarfs using spectro-astrometry. Spectro-astrometry is a novel technique which allows the user to recover spatial information from a spectrum beyond the limitations of the seeing of the observation. Using this technique we have found two brown dwarf outflows to date. In this chapter we outline this technique, describe our results for the brown dwarfs ρ-Oph 102 and 2MASS1207-3932 and discuss our future plans.