News and results

日本の空の下のM型矮星！

(Nihon no sora no shita no M-gata waisei!)

Cool Stars 23, 15–19 June 2026, Tokyo, Japan

https://coolstars22.github.io

 

M dwarfs under the Japanese sky!  At Cool Stars 23 we presented a summary of the main activities carried out within our project as well as promising perspectives to continue breakout M dwarf science in the near future.

Loredana Prisinzano, Jesús Maldonado and Laura Affer (from left to right) members of the “Know your little neighbours” PRIN project, presented the main novelties of their work at the Cool Stars 23 conference.

See our project summary poster ! 

Planets around M dwarfs: have you ever been to HADES?

How to date a spotted cool star?

M dwarfs, star and planet formation, and the role of the Italian community

Italian national conference of star and planet formation

January 27, 2025  – January 31, 2025 Location Haus Sexten – Via Dolomiti 45, 39030, Sexten

https://www.sexten-cfa.eu/event/inc25/

ages_young_Mstars

M dwarfs as important probes for stellar formation

European Astronomical Society Annual Meeting

23 – 27 June 2025
University College Cork
Cork, Ireland

https://eas.unige.ch/EAS2025/

See how neural Network approach and starspots dependent models can be used to determine stellar parameters and ages of young stars

neural_networks_starspot_models

staistical_analysis_part1

statistical_analysis_part2

statistical_analysis_part3

M dwarfs and the future of exoplanet research in Italy

1st Meeting of the Italian scientific community working on extrasolar planets,
26-27-28 February 2025, Rome
Exoplanets have been discovered not only around solar-like (FGK) Main-Sequence (MS) stars but also around brown dwarfs, low-mass stars, giant stars as well as white dwarfs and pulsars. However, current models of planet formation have their strongest observational evidence on the chemical signature of mostly FGK MS stars with planets. Little is known about the role of the host star’s chemical composition in planet formation in the low and in the high mass stellar domains. At the first EXO-IT meeting, our group presented the talk “Non solar-like stars as a probe for planet formation” in which we revisited the relationship between the presence of different types of planets and the stellar chemical composition in a large a sample of: i) M dwarfs with accurate and homogeneous chemical abundances, and ii) intermediate-mass stars from the pre-MS to the red giant phase.  For each sample, the properties of stars with and without known planets were compared and set in the context of current models of planet formation and stellar evolution.

 

Link to the full talk

M dwarfs as important targets for the upcoming Ariel mission

4th Meeting of the Italian community dedicated to Ariel’s scientific preparation, Palermo, 20-21-22 May 2024

 

The physical properties of the host stars of exoplanets are fundamental to understand their nature, origin, and evolution. At the 4th Ariel-IT meeting our team discussed our efforts to characterize the elusive M dwarf population “The characterization of M dwarf stars”.

 

Interested? Download our talk!

M dwarfs are cool!

Cool Stars 22, 24–28 June 2024, San Diego, California, USA

https://coolstars22.github.io

 

As Cool Stars 22 a specific session was devoted to the M dwarfs stars. Our team presented the work “Know your little neighbours: M dwarfs and planets in the Solar neighbourhood”.

Most stars in our immediate neighbourhood are not like the Sun. The largest (by number) stellar population in the solar neighbourhood is constituted by low-mass (or M dwarfs) stars. At the same time, M dwarfs have been recognised as important targets for exoplanet surveys. However, unlike their solar-type counterparts, the stellar properties of M dwarfs are poorly constrained.

 

Want to know more?, Have a look at the poster!