A new paper from Euclid Q1, is just out on arxiv. I’m particularly happy to be part of!
In this work, led by Maruša Žerjal (my collaborator at the IAC and the SUBSTELLAR project), we explored what Euclid can already tell us about the population of ultracool dwarfs. Using a remarkably simple photometric selection based on the very red Euclid ($I_\mathrm{E}-Y_\mathrm{E}$) colour, we identified 5306 new ultracool-dwarf candidates in the three Euclid Deep Fields, ranging from late-M to late-T dwarfs. Around 1200 are L and T dwarfs, and 546 objects are spectroscopically confirmed.
Euclid was designed primarily for cosmology, but its combination of deep optical and near-infrared photometry and spectroscopy makes it an extraordinary machine for finding and characterising the faintest members of the stellar and substellar populations.
And Q1 is only a tiny taste of what is coming. We find roughly 100 UCDs per square degree, which suggests that the final Euclid Wide Survey could contain at least 1.4 million ucd candidates, including around 300 000 L dwarfs and thousands of T dwarfs.
These estimates come from deliberately strict selection criteria that favour purity over completeness, so they are essentially a lower limit. Millions of ultracool dwarfs waiting in the Euclid data, exciting times ahead!
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