New Nearby Stars from NOAO and SMARTS Observations

In August 1999 the RECONS team began an aggressive southern parallax program under the auspices of the NOAO Surveys Program. Since February 2003, this program has continued as part of the SMARTS Consortium. Astrometric and photometric observing continues at the CTIO 0.9m, where more than 350 stars are on the program. A large spectroscopic program has also been carried out at the CTIO 1.5m.

We are targeting potentially nearby red, brown, and white dwarfs to build a comprehensive census of the solar neighborhood. Here we present results based on the first ∼100 definitive parallaxes and highlight several discoveries made during the first five years of the program. The total number of new RECONS systems --- those within 10 pc for which we have the first reliable trigonometric parallax measurements --- currently stands at 22. In addition, we are beginning to see evidence of perturbations on a few targets due to low mass secondaries, and have revealed two white dwarf companions to subdwarfs that are the first of their kind.

This work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, NASA's Space Interferometry Mission, and Georgia State University.