Meeting the Cool Neighbours I: Nearby stars in the NLTT Catalogue - Defining the sample

Abstract

We are currently undertaking a program aimed at identifying previously-unrecognised late-type dwarfs within 20 parsecs of the Sun. As a first step, we have cross-referenced Luyten's NLTT proper motion catalogue against the second incremental release of the 2MASS Point Source Catalogue, and use optical/infrared colours, derived by combining Luytens's m(r) estimates with 2MASS data, to identify candidate nearby stars. This paper describes the definition of a reference sample of 1245 stars, and presents a compilation of literature data for over one-third of the sample. Only 274 stars have trigonometric parallax measurements, but we have used data for nearby stars with well-determined trigonometric parallaxes to compute colour-magnitude relations in the (M(V), (V-K)), (M(V), (V-I)) and (M(I), (I-J)) planes, and use those relations to determine photometric parallaxes for NLTT stars with optical photometry. Based on the 2MASS JHK data alone, we have identified a further 42 ultracool dwarfs ((J-K > 0.99) and use (J-K) colours to estimate photometric parallaxes. Combining these various techniques, we identify 308 stars with formal distances of less than 20 parsecs, while a further 46 have distance estimates within 1-sigma of our survey limit. Of these 354 stars, 75, including 39 of the ultracool dwarfs. are new to nearby star catalogues. Two stars with both optical and near-infrared photometry are potential additions to the immediate Solar Neighbourhood, with formal distance estimates of less than 10 parsecs.

67 pages, 13 figures, to be published in The Astronomical Journal. More information can be found at http://www.stsci.edu/~inr/nstars.html

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