The Solar Neighborhood. 35. Distances to 1404 M Dwarf Systems Within 25 PC in the Southern Sky

Abstract : There is great interest in developing a comprehensive list of nearby M dwarfs for studies of the Milky Way s stellar population, both as astrophysically compelling individual objects and as prime targets for exoplanet and SETI search lists. These stars, typically called red dwarfs, dominate the stellar population of our Galaxy, accounting for more than 75% of all main sequence stars in the solar neighborhood (Henry et al. 2006). Yet, distance determinations for red dwarfs have remained a challenge. Trigonometric parallaxes are the optimal tool for calculating distances, but because of observing time and resource constraints, distance estimation methods are attractive alternatives and are often a preliminary step in determining which targets are to be added to parallax programs.