Completing the census of low-mass stars and brown dwarfs towards the Chamaeleon clouds.pdf

The molecular cloud complex of Chamaeleon hosts one of the richest populations of young low-mass stars in the Solar vicinity. However, the stellar and substellar census of several of young clusters and groups towards this region is still incomplete. This is starting to change thanks to the availability of wide-field missions such as Gaia, allowing for robust candidate selection using photometry, proper motions and parallaxes. In this contribution I will present the optical spectroscopic follow-up of low-mass stars in Cha I and epsilon Cha selected from Gaia DR2 and 2MASS. Our work identifies several new members of Cha-I, and increases the census of spectroscopically confirmed epsilon Cha members by more than 40%. We derive the first IMF in epsilon Cha that extends into the substellar regime (down to ~0.03 MSun), and we find it to be consistent with that of other young clusters. I will point out similarities between epsilon Cha and the southernmost part of Lower Centaurus Crux, both lying at similar distances and sharing the same proper motions. This suggest that the two groups may have been born during the same star formation event.