SO Webloquio: The Milky Way's young substellar population

Young clusters and star forming regions are home to a large number of substellar objects with masses below the hydrogen-burning limit at 0.075 MSun. Most of our knowledge about their populations comes from nearby regions (d lower 400 pc), where we find consistent formation rates of 2-5 young brown dwarfs per 10 newborn stars. Brown dwarf theories, on the other hand, predict that high gas or stellar densities, as well as the presence of massive OB stars, may be factors that boost the incidence of newly formed brown dwarfs with respect to stars. The next frontier in substellar studies, therefore, is the exploration of massive star clusters, characterized by significantly different star-forming environments than those found in our immediate vicinity. In this talk, I will review the efforts to characterize the brown dwarfs content in various environments in the Milky Way, from the nearby star forming regions, to massive young clusters, in which we confirm the first bona fide brown dwarfs beyond 1 kpc. Additionally, I will discuss an application of the supervised machine learning techniques to characterise stellar populations of massive young clusters, and our plans to extend these studies into the substellar regime using JWST.