This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This program will focus on discovering and characterizing the fainter members of the solar neighborhood: red dwarfs, white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and extrasolar planets. The core science goals of the RECONS (Research Consortium on Nearby Stars) effort at Georgia State University (GSU) are to (1) reveal new nearby and young stars with proper motions of 3 arcseconds/year down to undetectable levels, (2) move toward the completion of the census of all stars within 10 pc, (3) substantially increase the samples of red and white dwarfs within 25 pc, and (4) search astrometrically the nearest red and white dwarfs for brown dwarf and massive planetary companions with orbital periods up to a decade.
The Broader Impacts of this program include resources for professional and amateur astronomers consisting of the Census of Objects Nearer than 10 Parsecs and List of the Nearest 100 Stellar Systems, generating more than 13000 server requests to the RECONS website in the first nine months of 2008. A parallax database has recently been added. The program will support 1 postdoctoral researcher, 2 graduate students, and 1 undergraduate student.
