Do Low Luminosity Stars Matter?

Abstract

AbstractHistorically, low luminosity stars have attracted very little attention, in part because they are difficult to see except with large telescopes, however, by neglecting to study them we are leaving out the vast majority of stars in the Universe. Low mass stars evolve very slowly, it takes them trillions of years to burn their hydrogen, after which, they just turn into a He white dwarf, without ever going through the red giant phase. This lack of observable evolution partly explains the lack of interest in them. The search for the “missing mass” in the galactic plane turned things around and during the 60s and 70s the search for large M/L objects placed M-dwarfs and cool WDs among objects of astrophysical interest. New fields of astronomical research, like BDs and exoplanets appeared as spin-offs from efforts to find the “missing mass”. The search for halo white dwarfs, believed to be responsible for the observed microlensing events, is pursued by several groups. The progress in these last few years has been tremendous, here I present highlights some of the great successes in the field and point to some of the still unsolved issues.