The overall aim of our programme is to use data from the 2MASS near-infrared sky survey, both by itself and in combination with other catalogues, to identify previously unrecognised stellar and sub-stellar constituents of the Solar Neighbourhood. Our survey concentrates on dwarfs with spectral types later than M0, with the goal of obtaining as complete a catalogue as possible of those objects within 20 parsecs of the Sun. This programme is part of the NASA/NSF NStars initiative, which is also funding a number of other projects, which address a variety of other issues concerning the nearest stars. A shortened version of the original proposal, adapted in some respects to take account of more recent developments, is available in postscript form here.
Rather than working on a single, monolithic programme, our efforts are directed towards a number
of individual projects using a variety of techniques to search for
hitherto-undiscovered nearby low-mass dwarfs. The background to
the development of those techniques and an outline of the individual projects
are given at the following links.
The projects:
Since all of these projects are in progress at present, few of the associated pages can be
considered as complete. Both quantitative results and figures are liable to be updated
frequently.
Published results from these programmes are collected on
this page
Fifteen scientists, including undergraduates, graduate students, professorial faculty and observatory staff scientists have been involved at some level in this project.