Astrobiologically Interesting Stars Within 10 Parsecs Of The Sun

The existence of life based on carbon chemistry and water oceans relies upon planetary properties, chiefly climate stability, and stellar properties, such as mass, age, metallicity and Galactic orbits.

The latter can be well constrained with present knowledge. We present a detailed, up-to-date compilation of the atmospheric parameters, chemical composition, multiplicity and degree of chromospheric activity for the astrobiologically interesting solar-type stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun.

We determine their state of evolution, masses, ages and space velocities, and produce an optimized list of candidates that merit serious scientific consideration by the future space-based interferometry probes aimed at directly detecting Earth-sized extrasolar planets and seeking spectroscopic infrared biomarkers as evidence of photosynthetic life.

The initially selected stars number 33 solar-type within the population of 182 stars (excluding late M-dwarfs) closer than 10 pc. A comprehensive and detailed data compilation for these objects is still essentially lacking: a considerable amount of recent data has so far gone unexplored in this context.

We present 13 objects as the nearest “biostars”, after eliminating multiple stars, young, chromospherically active, hard X-ray emitting stars, and low metallicity objects. Three of these “biostars”, HD 1581, 109358 and 115617, closely reproduce most of the solar properties and are considered as premier targets. We show that approximately 7% of the nearby stars are optimally interesting targets for exobiology.

Essential data for the 33 solar-type stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun which are candidates to astrobiologically interesting stars: the Sun is included as the first entry. The first four columns are respectively the HD number, name, distance in parsecs and spectral type; the fifth and sixth columns are the effective temperature (in Kelvin) and metallicity; the seventh column is the logarithm of the stellar luminosity with respect to the Sun; the eighth and ninth columns are the X-ray luminosities, in 1027 erg s-1, and the logarithm of the chromospheric flux in the Ca II H and K lines, in erg cm-2 s-1 (see text for sources); the tenth column provides remarks under which each object was disregarded as an astrobiologically interesting target by our criteria, and the eleventh column provides the source of metallicity and effective temperature. Variability data from Hipparcos are given in the remarks to the table. — astro-ph

G.F. Porto de Mello (1), E.F. del Peloso (1 and 2), L. Ghezzi (2) ((1) Observatorio do Valongo/UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, (2) Observatorio Nacional/MCT, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Comments: 36 pages, recommended for publication in Astrobiology
Subjects: Astrophysics (astro-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:astro-ph/0511180 (or arXiv:astro-ph/0511180v1 for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.astro-ph/0511180
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Journal reference: Astrobiology 6:308-331,2006
Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1089/ast.2006.6.308
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Submission history
From: Eduardo Fernandez del Peloso
[v1] Mon, 7 Nov 2005 14:49:49 UTC (264 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0511180

Astrobiology,