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.