BU Research- Wanted: Red Dwarfs for TESS Mission
In a recent article from BU Research, IAR’s Assistant Professor Philip Muirhead discusses what the latest landing on Mars, InSight, could teach us with Doug Most.
“Red dwarf stars are much cooler and fainter than the sun; the sun is ten times brighter than even the brightest red dwarfs (which are actually almost yellow), and about ten thousand times brighter than the dimmest, ruby-red ones. Gaze up at the stars without binoculars or a telescope, and you won’t see a single red dwarf—they are that faint. Yet red dwarfs are actually the galactic norm, making up about 70% of all stars, says Philip Muirhead, BU assistant professor of astronomy.
Muirhead is something of a red dwarf aficionado. He specializes in pinning down the true mass, size, and age of these faint stars. So, soon after TESS got the go-ahead from NASA, mission scientists reached out to Muirhead and his team for help assembling a list of red dwarfs to target with the new spacecraft. The TESS scientists wanted to take aim at as many as 50,000 nearby red dwarfs. But, among all the rich star catalogs that modern astronomy has produced, there was no index of local cool dwarf stars, which are so faint that they often get overlooked.”
Read the rest of the Article here:
http://www.bu.edu/research/articles/wanted-red-dwarfs-for-tess-mission/