SUBSTELLAR project is aimed at mining the Euclid Telescope surveys for pushing the frontier of knowledge in substellar science.
The first challenge of the project is to identify, based on Euclid data, an unprecedented large number (>1.000.000) of very low mass (VLM) stars and Substellar-mass Objects (SMOs), including hard to find objects such as halo brown dwarfs and young free-floating planetary-mass objects.
Specific pipelines will be developed to extract the utmost information from Euclid for faint infrared objects.
The second challenge is to discover very low-mass binaries and giant planets around VLM stars and SMOs using custom-made image analysis, astrometric monitoring and spectral fitting techniques.
The third challenge is to combine the information gathered from harnessing the previous two challenges to determine the VLM stellar and substellar luminosity function, infer the most likely low-mass end of the Initial Mass Function (IMF), and explore its degree of universality in different components of the Milky Way.