Chris Gelino (IPAC) - In Search of the Coldest Atmospheres: Finding Companions to the Latest WISE Brown Dwarfs

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission (WISE) has uncovered brown dwarfs with effective temperatures ~400K, bringing us ever closer to finding objects with Jupiter-like atmospheres (T=128K). Being so cold, these brown dwarfs are intrinsically faint and necessarily close, making them the best targets for further study. We have been using the Hubble Space Telescope and W.M. Keck Telescope to obtain high resolution images of WISE-discovered brown dwarfs with spectral types T8 and later (T<700K) in order to search for fainter and colder companions. During this talk, I will discuss the HST and Keck observing programs and provide some of the preliminary results from the survey.