Description
We present deep 3.8{mu}m L' imaging observations of the Trapezium cluster in Orion obtained with the ESO VLT. We use these observations to (1) search for infrared excess emission and evidence for protoplanetary disks associated with the faint, substellar population of this young cluster and (2) investigate the nature and extent of a recently discovered population of deeply embedded sources located in dense molecular gas behind the cluster. We detected 38 L' sources with substellar luminosities. In addition, we detected 24 L' sources that were spectroscopically classified as substellar objects in previous studies. Examining the infrared colors of all these sources, we determine an infrared excess fraction of 50%{+/-}20% from the J, H, K_s_ and L' colors for both the luminosity-selected and spectroscopically selected substellar samples.
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