Characterizing the Parents: Exoplanets Around Cool Stars

TL;DR

This paper presents interferometric measurements of cool star parameters to better understand their radiation environments and habitable zones, addressing calibration challenges in stellar models for low-mass stars.

Contribution

It provides direct stellar parameter measurements for late-type dwarfs, improving the calibration of models for low-mass stars hosting exoplanets.

Findings

Direct stellar radius measurements obtained

Enhanced understanding of habitable zones around cool stars

Improved calibration data for stellar models

Abstract

The large majority of stars in the Milky Way are late-type dwarfs, and the frequency of low-mass exoplanets in orbits around these late-type dwarfs appears to be high. In order to characterize the radiation environments and habitable zones of the cool exoplanet host stars, stellar radius and effective temperature, and thus luminosity, are required. It is in the stellar low-mass regime, however, where the predictive power of stellar models is often limited by sparse data volume with which to calibrate the methods. We show results from our CHARA survey that provides directly determined stellar parameters based on interferometric diameter measurements, trigonometric parallax, and spectral energy distribution fitting.