Metallicities of M Dwarfs Targeted by the MEarth Transiting Planet Survey

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

M dwarf metallicities have traditionally been very difficult to measure and observers have turned to empirical calibrations employing M dwarfs in wide binaries with FGK stars, where the primary has a measured metallicity. Rojas-Ayala et al. (2010) developed an empirical calibration based on the equivalent widths of alkali metal lines in the near-IR and an index measuring effective temperature. We use this method to measure the metallicities of M dwarfs in the MEarth transiting planet survey. The MEarth project is photometrically monitoring 2000 of the nearest mid to late M dwarfs in the northern sky and will expand in the next year to include an additional 2000 stars in the southern hemisphere. We present a study of 200 MEarth targets for which we have obtained near-IR spectra with IRTF/SpeX and Magellan/FIRE. We have previously determined photometric rotation periods for 100 of these stars; the remaining targets have measured parallaxes placing them within 25pc. All of the stars in our sample are fully convective. We will discuss the physical properties of stars observed to date, including correlations between rotation period, galactic kinematics and metallicity.
The MEarth team acknowledges funding from the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering and from the National Science Foundation under grant number AST-0807690. ERN is supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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