The Comprehensive Archive of Substellar and Planetary Accretion Rates (CASPAR)

OVERVIEW

Recent discoveries of still-forming brown dwarfs (BD) and exoplanets have placed new importance on understanding the mechanisms and environments that control the formation and evolution of substellar objects. Accretion mechanisms are well understood for stars, and substellar objects have been assumed to operate similarly; however, simulations suggest that the accretion rates of substellar objects are controlled in part by their formation mechanism.

The Comprehensive Archive of subStellar Accretion Rates (CASPAR) was developed to allow for the disentangling of physical and systematics effects in the inferred accretion properties of substellar objects. The CASPAR Database consists of >1000 measured accretion rates from ~800 T Tauri stars, isolated BDs, and bound planetary mass companions, making it the largest compiled sample of accretion rates for low mass stellar and substellar objects to-date (mid 2023). The database also includes systematically rederived physical and accretion properties for all objects using (a) Gaia distances, (b) consistent ages and evolutionary model grids, and (c) a single set of line to total-accretion-luminosity scaling relations.