Brown dwarfs & free-floating planetary mass objects in the Rosette Nebula: imaging

In this programme, we will obtain a census of Planetary Mass Objects (PMOs) in the core of the low density star-forming cluster, NGC 2244, at the centre of the Rosette Nebula. To achieve this we will obtain deep NIRCam observations in 8 photometric filters (F115W, F140M, F162M, F182M, F300M, F335M, F360M, and F444W), which give us access to the effective temperature, dust extinction, circumstellar disk excess emission, and photometric indices sensitive to both H2O and CH4. These observations will be complete down to a limiting mass of 1MJup and will probe the very bottom of the initial mass function (IMF). The goal of this programme is to establish how local stellar density affects the abundance of PMOs in contrast to our ongoing GTO programme on the much denser Orion Nebula and Trapezium Cluster, and other young clusters being observed with JWST.

Version 1: 2023-06-28