Related papers: M Dwarfs, Microlensing, and the Mass Budget of the…
We describe a program of star counts in the range 19 < I < 26 made with the WFPC cameras aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. Red (V-I > 1.0) stars at these magnitudes are primarily disk and spheroid M dwarfs. The stars are found both on…
We compared the number of faint stars detected in deep survey fields with the current stellar distribution model of the Galaxy and found that the detected number in the H band is significantly smaller than the predicted number. This…
We use a new technique to search for faint red stars in the Hubble Deep Field (HDF) imaged by the Wide Field Camera (WFC2) on the {\it Hubble Space Telescope}. We construct a densely sampled stellar light profile from a set of undersampled…
We use star counts from 13 deep HST fields imaged with the {\it Wide Field Camera - 2} in order to constrain the amount of dark matter in the Galaxy that can be in the form of low-mass main sequence stars or white-dwarfs. Based on the…
A substantial fraction the stellar mass attributed to galaxies is invisible: stars close to the hydrogen burning limit, brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes. These constituents do, however, gravitationally micro-lens…
We study a sample of 257 Galactic disk M dwarfs (8<M_V<18.5) found in images obtained using HST. These include 192 stars in 22 fields imaged with the repaired WFC2 with mean limiting mag I=23.7 and 65 stars in 162 fields imaged with the…
We re-examine a deep {\it Hubble Space Telescope} pencil-beam search for red dwarfs, stars just massive enough to burn Hydrogen. The authors of this search (Bahcall, Flynn, Gould \& Kirhakos 1994) found that red dwarfs make up less than 6\%…
We use broadband photometry and low-resolution spectra of a complete sample of late-K and M dwarfs brighter than I=22 in three fields at high galactic latitude to study issues relating to galactic structure and large scale abundance…
We analyze 166 spheroid subdwarfs $(6.5<M_V<14.5)$ found in 53 fields observed with the Wide Field Camera on the {\it Hubble Space Telescope}. The fields cover 221 square arcmin over a wide range of directions. The spheroid luminosity…
{}From deep optical images of three clusters selected by virtue of their X-ray luminosity and/or optical richness (1455+22; $z=0.26$, 0016+16; $z=0.55$ and 1603+43; $z=0.89$), we construct statistically-complete samples of faint field…
We present an analysis of the faint M star population seen as foreground contaminants in deep extragalactic surveys. We use space-based data to separate such stars from high redshift galaxies in a publically-available dataset, and consider…
Low-mass stars, those with main-sequence lifetimes that are of order the age of the Universe, provide unique constraints on the Initial Mass Function (IMF) when they formed. Star counts in systems with simple star-formation histories are…
We present and discuss optical measurements of the faint end of the galaxy luminosity function down to M_R = -10 in five different local environments of varying galaxy density and morphological content. The environments we studied, in order…
The recent discovery of microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud has excited much interest in the nature of the lensing population. Detailed analyses indicate that the mass of these objects ranges from 0.3-0.8 solar masses,…
We suggest a new component of the Milky Way galaxy that can account for both the optical depth and the event durations obtained by the MACHO microlensing survey toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. This component is consistent with recent…
We present a new approach to measuring the thickness of a partially face-on stellar disk, using dust geometry. In a moderately-inclined disk galaxy, the fraction of reddened stars is expected to be 50% everywhere, assuming that dust lies in…
We examine the most recent observational constraints arising from i) small-scale and large-scale Galactic dynamical properties, ii) star counts at faint magnitude and iii) microlensing experiments. From these constraints, we determine the…
The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~1 M_{sun} have been ruled out as major components of a…
Star counts made with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) probe four populations that are important for dark matter: disk, halo, bulge, and intergalactic. The disk mass function falls for masses M<0.6 Msun in sharp contrast to the rising…
We investigate the role of stellar mass in shaping the intrinsic thickness of faint systems by determining the probability distribution of apparent axis ratios for two different samples that probe the faint end of the galaxy luminosity…