Exploration of Exoplanets transiting Red Dwarfs within 50 ly of the Sun

Abstract

Many will say that other stars’ sizes are about the same as the Sun’s. That is not quite true. The Sun is known to be a yellow dwarf. However, the most common stars are red dwarfs, the smallest and coolest stars on the main sequence, a continuous band of stars that appears on plots of stellar color versus brightness. Compared to the sun, they are lower in luminosity, making them harder to detect, as the TESS gathers the flux of the stars, directly proportional to the luminosity, the fixed brightness of a star. However, their small size offers key advantages to searching for Earth-like planets. For instance, the habitable zone is closer to the star, making transits easier to detect due to frequency. This work will explore the red dwarfs that are in Jen Winter5’s catalog that we identify to have transiting planets from and present the calculated parameters of the star systems.