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'Just under three years ago, Philip Muirhead, an astronomy professor at BU, was asked to assemble a team to identify nearby red dwarf stars for NASA’s latest satellite to orbit. His team was composed of undergraduate and graduate students, other professors, and astronomers from across the world.

TESS’s mission is to find 50 terrestrial Earth-like planets, as opposed to gas planets, around nearby red dwarf stars and sun-like stars, Muirhead said. NASA’s previous Kepler mission found many of these planets, but they were too far away to study in great detail.

“The goal here is to find planets that are more like Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury,” Muirhead said. “… TESS is really a hunting mission.”'

“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.”

'Modern astronomy looks a lot different from its popular depiction. Instead of squinting into a telescope eyepiece beneath a creaky old dome, today’s astronomers work at computers, scanning data coming in from sensitive cameras that sit at the tail end of the telescope’s optical system. This is fly-by-wire astronomy, and while it may lack some of the romance of the old way, it opens up the possibility of “remote observing”—that is, using a telescope while sitting hundreds or even thousands of miles away. For more than a decade, taking advantage of high-speed internet and computerized telescope control, astronomers have increasingly been choosing to observe from afar, sparing the expense and hassle of far-flung travel.

Thanks to a special partnership, BU observers typically get about 40 nights each year on the DCT, which is run by the Lowell Observatory, and a growing share of that research is done remotely. But until 2015, BU lacked a dedicated space for remote observing—astronomers typically ran the telescope from their office computers or even from home.'