A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.
"Characterization by proxy" is the technique used by Sarah Ballard, a post-doctoral researcher at the UW, to infer the properties of small, relatively cool stars too distant for measurement, by comparing them to closer stars that now can be directly observed.
Ballard is lead author of a study accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal that used this method and observations from the Kepler Space Telescope to learn the nature of the distant star Kepler-61.
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