How does one find dwarves in a crowd of giants? Evgenya Shkolnik at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington DC and her colleagues searched X-ray data gathered by the now-defunct German satellite ROSAT for nearby M-class dwarf stars less than 300 million years old.
Previous surveys placed greater emphasis on higher mass, higher luminosity Sun-like stars. The team identified 185 likely candidates before ruling out older interlopers by spectroscopy. The 144 remaining, some as small as 10% of the mass of the Sun, have a better chance than easier-to-spot, higher-mass stars of revealing the early formation of rocky Earth-like planets.
If any of the dwarves do host planets, their proximity to Earth (most are within 25 parsecs) will make them relatively easy to study in detail.
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Astronomy: Little neighbours. Nature 460, 15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460015c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/460015c
