JWST Imaging of the Closest Globular Clusters. II. Discovery of Brown Dwarfs in NGC 6397 and Measurement of Age from the Brown Dwarf Cooling Sequence, Using SANDee—A New Grid of Model Isochrones across the Hydrogen-burning Limit

Abstract

Abstract Globular clusters contain vast repositories of metal-poor stars that represent some of the oldest stellar generations in the Universe. The archaeological footprint of early Galactic evolution may be retained in the measurable properties of globular clusters, such as their ages, mass functions, and chemical abundances. Until recently, all photometric studies of globular clusters were restricted to stellar members. Now, the sensitivity of JWST can extend this analysis to the substellar regime. If detected in sufficient numbers, brown dwarf members can provide tight constraints on the properties of their parent population. We present SANDee—a new grid of stellar models that accurately represent the color–magnitude diagrams of globular clusters across the hydrogen-burning limit at a wide range of metallicities. Using JWST NIRCam photometry and the new models, we identify three brown dwarfs in the globular cluster NGC 6397 with T eff = 1300–1800 K, confirmed by both proper motion and model fitting. We use the observed luminosities of discovered brown dwarfs to obtain the first age estimate of a globular cluster from its substellar cooling sequence: 13.4 ± 3.3 Gyr. We also derive the local mass function of the cluster across the hydrogen-burning limit and find it to be top heavy, suggesting extensive dynamical evolution. We expect that the constraints on both age and mass function of NGC 6397 derived in this work can be greatly improved by a second epoch of NIRCam imaging in the same field.