BDKP. III. Parallaxes for 70 ultracool dwarfs

A similar yet dampened brightening of [0.3-0.5] mag happens at M_H_ and a plateau or dimming of [-0.2 to -0.3] mag is seen in M_K_. Comparison with evolutionary models that vary gravity, metallicity, and cloud thickness verifies that for L into T dwarfs, decreasing cloud thickness reproduces brown dwarf near-IR color-magnitude diagrams. However we find that a near constant temperature of 1200 +/-100 K along a narrow spectral subtype of T0-T4 is required to account for the brightening and color-magnitude diagram of the L-dwarf/T-dwarf transition.

There is a significant population of both L and T dwarfs which are red or potentially "ultra-cloudy" compared to the models, many of which are known to be young indicating a correlation between enhanced photospheric dust and youth. For the low surface gravity or young companion L dwarfs we find that 8 out of 10 are at least [0.2-1.0] mag underluminous in M_JH_and/or M_K_compared to equivalent spectral type objects. We speculate that this is a consequence of increased dust opacity and conclude that low surface gravity L dwarfs require a completely new spectral-type/absolute magnitude polynomial for analysis.