International Research Fellowship Program: Using Kinematics to Identify Juvenile-Aged Cool Stars in Nearby Moving Groups.

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0965192FahertyThe International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Jacqueline K. Faherty to work with Dr. Maria T. Ruiz and Dr. Nicole van der Bliek at the University of Chile and with Dr. Andrew West at Boston University in the US.Star formation studies address questions at the center of modern astrophysics producing results on topics ranging from the planetary frequency in the Galaxy to the conditions of the primordial Universe under which the first stars were born. The most abundant stars in the Galaxy are the lowest-temperature M dwarfs therefore they are a key to understanding how chemical, environmental and/or spatial conditions affect the processes of star formation. Astronomers have long studied regions such as Orion, Ophiucus, Taurus etc, in great detail and our knowledge of many physical characteristics of star formation come from studies of these dense and highly active areas on the sky. Unfortunately, the distances to these star-forming regions make detailed studies--directly detecting and resolving disks, looking for low-mass companions--of the intrinsically faint M dwarfs, difficult. The most promising M dwarf targets for current and future star and planetary formation studies will be found in the recently identified juvenile aged (8-50 Myr), close (100pc), co-moving collections of stars called moving groups. The youthfulness of moving groups makes them appealing targets for searching for circumstellar and/or accretion disks and the proximity to the Sun makes them easy targets for imaging and spectroscopy to resolve disk structure and companions. The objective of the proposed research is to take advantage of a unique kinematic dataset of M dwarfs, and investigate potential new members of intermediate-aged moving groups in the local vicinity of the Sun. These new members fill large gaps in our understanding of the processes of planetary and stellar development.