The MEarth Project: Characterizing the Nearest M Dwarfs while Searching for Transiting, Habitable Exoplanets

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

Scientific paper

Rate now

  [ 0.00 ] – not rated yet Voters 0   Comments 0

Details

Scientific paper

With the MEarth Project, we are using an array of modest telescopes to monitor the the brightness of 4,000 nearby, mid-to-late M-dwarfs with the primary goal of detecting transiting, habitable super-Earths. In addition to MEarth's exoplanetary science, we have discovered several bright eclipsing binaries that will provide new tests for stellar evolutionary models below the fully convective boundary. Furthermore, we are measuring the photometric variability of our well-defined sample of field M-dwarfs on timescales from 20 minutes to 100 days. Estimating rotation periods for a subsample of our stars with measured parallaxes, we are starting to probe the poorly understood evolution of angular momentum at the bottom of the main sequence. I will discuss these results, as well as our ongoing effort to gather new low-resolution spectra in order to link MEarth's measurements of variability to spectroscopic activity indicators.

No associations

LandOfFree

Say what you really think

Search LandOfFree.com for scientists and scientific papers. Rate them and share your experience with other people.

Rating

The MEarth Project: Characterizing the Nearest M Dwarfs while Searching for Transiting, Habitable Exoplanets does not yet have a rating. At this time, there are no reviews or comments for this scientific paper.

If you have personal experience with The MEarth Project: Characterizing the Nearest M Dwarfs while Searching for Transiting, Habitable Exoplanets, we encourage you to share that experience with our LandOfFree.com community. Your opinion is very important and The MEarth Project: Characterizing the Nearest M Dwarfs while Searching for Transiting, Habitable Exoplanets will most certainly appreciate the feedback.

Rate now

     

Profile ID: LFWR-SCP-O-1742322

  Search
All data on this website is collected from public sources. Our data reflects the most accurate information available at the time of publication.