The Luminosity Function of Early M Dwarf Stars in Selected Area 109

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

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Scientific paper

Determining the luminosity function of different regions of the Milky Way is essential to our understanding of Galactic evolutionary processes. As part of an ongoing research project at Ball State University, we have used CaH photometry to distinguish between M dwarfs and M giants in Kaptyn's Selected Area 109 (SA109). The presence of CaH in the spectra of M dwarfs, and its absence in M giants, is a physical signature of the greater gravitational surface pressure in M dwarfs. Thus, plotting the similar R-I colors of M stars, against the discriminating CaH-r colors between M types, gives us a clear classification method. We present the results for data from the SARA telescope for half of the fields which comprise the whole square degree of SA109. With a limiting magnitude near R=15 we identified numbers of early M dwarfs similar to predictions using the luminosity function for nearby stars. This project was funded by a partnership between the NSF grant AST-0552798, REU, DoD ASSURE programs and Ball State University.

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