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Published January 2017 | Published
Journal Article Open

The Solar Neighborhood. XXXVIII. Results from the CTIO/SMARTS 0.9 m: Trigonometric Parallaxes for 151 Nearby M Dwarf Systems

Abstract

We present 160 new trigonometric parallaxes for 151 M dwarf systems from the REsearch Consortium On Nearby Stars (RECONS) group's long-term astrometry/photometry program at the CTIO/SMARTS 0.9 m telescope. Most systems (124 or 82%) are found to lie within 25 pc. The stars have 119 mas yr^(-1) ≤ μ ≤ 828 mas yr^(−1) and 3.85 ≤ (V-K) ≤ 8.47. Among these are 58 systems from the SuperCOSMOS-RECONS search, discovered via our proper motion trawls of the SuperCOSMOS digitized archival photographic plates, while the remaining stars were suspected via photometric distance estimates to lie nearby. Sixteen systems were newly discovered via astrometric perturbations to be binaries, many of which are ideal for accurate mass determinations due to their proximity and orbital periods on the order of a decade. A variability analysis of the stars presented, two-thirds of which are new results, shows six of the stars to vary by more than 20 mmag. This effort brings the total number of parallaxes for M dwarf systems measured by RECONS to nearly 500 and increases by 26% the number of southern M dwarf systems with accurate trigonometric parallaxes placing them within 25 pc.

Additional Information

© 2016. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2016 August 5; revised 2016 October 18; accepted 2016 October 24; published 2016 December 20. This research was made possible by NSF grants AST 05-07711, AST 09-08402, and AST 14-12026. We also thank the members of the SMARTS Consortium, who have enabled the operations of the small telescopes at CTIO since 2003, as well as the observer support at CTIO, specifically Edgardo Cosgrove, Arturo Gomez, Manuel Hernandez, Alberto Miranda, Mauricio Rojas, Hernan Tirado, and Joselino Vasquez. We thank the referee for a very thorough review of the paper that has allowed us to improve it. This research has made use of data obtained from the SuperCOSMOS Science Archive, prepared and hosted by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, which is funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. Data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation have been used extensively, as have the SIMBAD database and the Aladin and Vizier interfaces, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. Data from the ROSAT and GALEX NASA missions were used in this publication. J.G.W. is currently supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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August 22, 2023
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