Low mass T Tauri and young brown dwarf candidates in the Chamaeleon II dark cloud found by DENIS

We define a sample designed to select low-mass T Tauri stars and young brown dwarfs using DENIS data in the Chamaeleon II molecular cloud. We use a star count method to construct an extinction map of the Chamaeleon II cloud. We select our low-mass T Tauri star and young brown dwarf candidates by their strong infrared color excess in the I - J/J - K-s color-color dereddened diagram. We retain only objects with colors I - J greater than or equal to 2, and spatially distributed in groups around the cloud cores. This provides a sample of 70 stars of which 4 are previously known T Tauri stars. We have carefully checked the reliability of all these objects by visual inspection of the DENIS images. Thanks to the association of the optical I band to the infra-red J and K-s bands in DENIS, we can apply this selection method to all star formation regions observed in the southern hemisphere. We also identify six DENIS sources with X-ray sources detected by ROSAT. Assuming that they are reliable low-mass candidates and using the evolutionary models for low-mass stars, we estimate the age of these sources between 1 Myr and <10 Myr.