A full-sky census of brown dwarfs within 20pc

We combine these with prior studies to build a list of 525 known L, T, and Y dwarfs within 20pc of the Sun, 38 of which are presented here for the first time. Using published photometry and spectroscopy as well as our own follow-up, we present an array of color-magnitude and color-color diagrams to further characterize census members, and we provide polynomial fits to the bulk trends.

Using these characterizations, we assign each object a Teff value and judge sample completeness over bins of Teff and spectral type. Except for types >=T8 and Teff<600K, our census is statistically complete to the 20pc limit. We compare our measured space densities to simulated density distributions and find that the best fit is a power law (dN/dM{propto}M^-{alpha}^) with {alpha}=0.6+/-0.1.