The Department of Astronomy 2024-2025 Colloquium Series Presents:

"Atmospheric Retrievals and Stellar Abundances of Benchmark Brown Dwarf Systems: What can we learn? Where are we going?"

Brown dwarf characterization can help inform exoplanet studies, which provides key insight into gas-giant formation and evolution. The chemical abundances of atomic and molecular species of host stars can help to provide insight into planetary formation processes, by helping us to understand the initial composition of protoplanetary disks. Stellar abundance measurements combined with atmospheric retrievals are a powerful combination to understand the chemical and physical processes in atmospheres of brown dwarfs to probe formation pathways. In this talk, I will present results from an atmospheric retrieval study of two dusty planetary-mass objects using the Brewster retrieval framework. I will discuss retrieval approaches and lessons learned from retrievals in the complex regime of young cloudy brown dwarfs. Lastly, I will present a small study on the characterization and abundance determination for FGK stars hosting benchmark brown dwarf companions using PEPSI.