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Project Progress

We established a database of stellar spectra during the past year to serve as a
dynamic repository within the VPL website for accurate reference spectra of stars
that are considered relevant hosts in the search for habitable exoplanets. These
spectra continuously span the ultraviolet to the far-infrared, and are the most realistic representations that we can construct of the spectral energy distributions of these stars. Their optical and infrared ranges are synthetic spectra of the stellar photospheres, absolutely normalized by all available well-characterized photometry. The ultraviolet portion is the actual spectrum of each star (observed by the IUE satellite), merged with its photospheric spectrum. The database now contains spectra for the Sun, a G0V low-activity star, a G0V high-activity star, and spectra for F2V, K2V, M4.5V and M3.5Ve spectral types. This publicly available database can be accessed at http://vpl.ipac.caltech.edu/spectra/stellar/frontpage.htm . The M star spectra were recently published in Segura et al., 2005, where they were used as inputs to planetary climate-chemical models that explored the lifetimes and detectability of biosignatures for planets around M stars.

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