Little neighbours
How does one find dwarves in a crowd of
giants? Evgenya Shkolnik at the Carnegie
Institution of Washington in Washington
DC and her colleagues searched X-ray
data gathered by the now-defunct German
satellite ROSAT for nearby M-class dwarf
stars less than 300 million years old.
Previous surveys placed greater emphasis
on higher mass, higher luminosity Sunlike
stars. The team identified 185 likely
candidates before ruling out older interlopers
by spectroscopy. The 144 remaining, some
as small as 10% of the mass of the Sun, have
a better chance than easier-to-spot, highermass
stars of revealing the early formation of
rocky Earth-like planets.
If any of the dwarves do host planets,
their proximity to Earth (most are within 25
parsecs) will make them relatively easy to
study in detail.
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