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Jim Caffey
Missouri State University
Advisor: Dr. George Wolf
Abstract
The majority of stars in the Galaxy are low-mass red dwarf stars. More than half of the stars in the Galaxy belong in multiple pairs called binaries. Yet, there have been less than a dozen binary stars whose components are low-mass red dwarf stars. This is because these stars are very faint and hard to detect. A special case of these stars is the eclipsing binary star. It is through the study of eclipsing binary stars that astronomers can deduce the physical properties of these important stars. One of the problems in this field of astronomy is that the observational evidence collected by others so far, for the most part, does not match well with the theoretical models for these low-mass stars. Our study is looking for more of these elusive red dwarf eclipsing binary stars in order to add to the small data set already established and hopefully constrain a model. In this report, we present a progress update.
Jim Caffey started his career with NASA 18 years ago as a high school intern in the NASA Space Grant program. Today he is a NASA Graduate Fellow at Missouri State University where he is studying Astronomy and Geology. He has been teaching at the college level for 11 years and has taught at 4 different universities, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Physics, Astronomy, and Space Science at Drury University in Springfield. He plans to pursue a PhD in Astronomy or Astronomy Education. He currently serves NASA as an Ambassador to the Jet Propulsion Lab doing public outreach.
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