THE SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD. XXXVII. THE MASS–LUMINOSITY RELATION FOR MAIN-SEQUENCE M DWARFS

By G. Benedict, T. Henry, O. Franz, B. Mcarthur, L. Wasserman, W. Jao, Phillip Cargile, S. Dieterich, A. Bradley, E. Nelan and 1 more. 2016

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a mass–luminosity relation (MLR) for red dwarfs spanning a range of masses from 0.62 to the end of the stellar main sequence at 0.08 . The relation is based on 47 stars for which dynamical masses have been determined, primarily using astrometric data from Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS) 3 and 1r, white-light interferometers on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and radial velocity data from McDonald Observatory. For our HST/FGS sample of 15 binaries, component mass errors range from 0.4% to 4.0% with a median error of 1.8%. With these and masses from other sources, we construct a V-band MLR for the lower main sequence with 47 stars and a K-band MLR with 45 stars with fit residuals half of those of the V band. We use GJ 831 AB as an example, obtaining an absolute trigonometric parallax, πabs = 125.3 ± 0.3 mas, with orbital elements yielding and . The mass precision rivals that derived for eclipsing binaries. A remaining major task is the interpretation of the intrinsic cosmic scatter in the observed MLR for low-mass stars in terms of physical effects. In the meantime, useful mass values can be estimated from the MLR for the ubiquitous red dwarfs that account for 75% of all stars, with applications ranging from the characterization of exoplanet host stars to the contribution of red dwarfs to the mass of the universe.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/14d8a6731b16e04b0889276a19fa0cf845cc9e6c

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Citations in the corpus

The stellar rotation–activity relationship in fully convective M dwarfs (2018, methodology): “Absolute K-band magnitudes were calculated using measured trigonometric (available for the majority of targets) or photometric parallaxes (see Table 1), and stellar masses calculated from the MK to stellar mass relation in Benedict et al. (2016).”
Individual Dynamical Masses of Ultracool Dwarfs (2017, background): “This stands in stark contrast to the situation for individual dynamical masses of earlier-type M dwarfs, where dozens of measurements over the years have now reached very high precision (e.g., Henry & McCarthy 1993; Delfosse et al. 2000; Benedict et al. 2016).”
Binary Star Orbits. V. The Nearby White Dwarf/Red Dwarf Pair 40 Eri BC (2017, result): “The mass error here is comparable to the other mass errors of Table 11 of Benedict et al. (2016).”
The Updated BaSTI Stellar Evolution Models and Isochrones. I. Solar-scaled Calculations (2018, result): “Figure 22 displays a similar comparison with the more recent mass-luminosity empirical data by Benedict et al. (2016).”
The CARMENES search for exoplanets around M dwarfs (2018, methodology): “These values are the same using instead empirical mass– luminosity relations such the ones presented by Delfosse et al. (2000) and Benedict et al. (2016).”