# # Program information file # PROGRAM_ID 2021B049 PROGRAM_TITLE Discovering the youngest free-floating planets: spectroscopic confirmation of candidate young brown dwarfs and planetary mass objects in Serpens Core with the novel W-band filter PROGRAM_INV1 Sophie Dubber PROGRAM_INV2 Beth Biller PROGRAM_INV3 Michael Liu PROGRAM_INV4 Jessy Jose PROGRAM_INV5 Zhoujian Zhang PROGRAM_SCICAT stellar PROGRAM_ABSTRACT_BEG Low mass brown dwarfs and free-floating planets in star-forming regions are vital tracers of the low mass end of star-formation and key analogues to exoplanets around stars. An efficient method of searching for these young objects is to identify them via spectral features, such as the 1.45 micron H2O absorption band seen in spectra of M-L-T-Y type objects [Allers & Liu, 2020]. We acquired a 1.45 micron filter with specifications appropriate to CFHT and used it with WIRCam in 2016A and 2017A to survey the Serpens star-forming region, in order to detect the lowest mass components of this cluster. Here we propose for low-resolution IRTF SpeX spectroscopic follow-up to confirm the substellar nature and determine the surface gravity of our 12 remaining bright Serpens Core candidates. These observations of new low mass objects will provide an even lower log-g extension to the INT-G / VL-G gravity classification sequence [Allers & Liu 2013] and will constrain the very low mass end of the initial mass function in Serpens Core. PROGRAM_ABSTRACT_END