SIMBAD references

Several scenarios have been put forward recently for the formation of substellar objects. Here we summarize our new observations of brown dwarfs and very low-mass stars in the young σ Ori cluster and the Chamaeleon I star-forming region. They show that at least some young brown dwarfs possess accretion disks, from which they are actively accreting matter. This and the distribution of brown dwarfs in the ChaI cloud leads us to conclude that the formation of brown dwarfs likely is very similar to the formation of stars, through the collapse of a dense cloud core.