NEILL REID, SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE
PRINCETON ASTRONOMY COLLOQUIUM - APRIL 27, 2004
ABSTRACT
Meeting the Neighbours: Progress on a 20-parsec Census
The stars and brown dwarfs in the immediate vicinity of the Sun can provide
crucial insight on the overall properties of the
Galactic disk. Unfortunately, current studies are hampered by the fact that the
best current census becomes woefully incomplete atdistances of 10 parsecs or
les for the lowest luminosity local inhabitants. In an effort to address this
issue, I have been leading a project, under the aegis of the NASA/NSF NStars
initiative, which aims to use data from the 2MASS near-infrared sky survey to
fill in the missing objects out to a distance of 20 parsecs,
concentrating particularly the ultracool late-M and L dwarfs which bridge
the hydrogen burning limit. In this talk, I will summarise the
progress so far achieved towards attaining our goal of a statistically
complete census.