Astronomy Colloquium

Nearby (sub)stellar astronomy is undergoing a renaissance. The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has discovered room-temperature Y-type brown  dwarfs and has revealed over two dozen missing stellar and substellar members  in the canonical 8-pc sample, which itself contains less than 200 total  systems. One of these discoveries is the 2.0-pc distant L+T dwarf binary WISE 1049-5319 (Luhman 16AB), now recognized as the third closest system to the Sun.  In this talk I will give an update of our current knowledge of Y dwarfs, highlight what they and other nearby discoveries are telling us about the substellar mass function for field objects, and discuss how new motion surveys of the Solar Neighborhood are revealing previously missed objects not selected by traditional color searches.