Dr. Eliot Halley Vrijmoet

VRY-MOOT (he/him)

Education/Research Postdoc Fellow
of the Five College Astronomy Department

Department of Astronomy
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

Office: McConnell 410A

*New* e-mail: evrijmoet@smith.edu @eliotVRIJ

Eliot standing outside with coffee. — *Photo by Leonardo Paredes*

Eliot standing next to a tall building, with coffee. — *Photo by Leonardo Paredes*

(updated 8 March 2024)

ORCiD

My work on ADS ADS logo

(refereed list)

My Research Life

Astrometry of M dwarf binaries

My favorite things are low-mass stars with companions (planets, brown dwarfs, other stars).

Which orbits tend to occur? Which orbits tend not to occur?
What are the distributions of orbital parameters for M dwarf companions?
What can this tell us about the physics of star formation?
What can this tell us about where to look for planets?

I am extensively experienced with ground-based astrometry at RECONS. This includes:

Observing procedures for high-quality astrometric data. (trained at CTIO 0.9m)
Data reduction for >400 systems, with focus on careful frame selection and centroiding.
Completing a comprehensive update of RECONS data pipeline, translating it from Bash+IRAF to Python.
Fitting orbits of unresolved companions using MCMC and least-squares techniques.

My PhD advisor, & RECONS fearless leader:
Todd J Henry

RECONS first mate (& my honorary advisor):
Wei-Chun Jao

My first paper (Vrijmoet et al. 2020) compared RECONS astrometry to Gaia DR2 to define criteria for identifying unresolved binaries based on their astrometric fits.

My second paper (Vrijmoet et al. 2022) presents the first 1.5 years of our M dwarf SOAR speckle campaign.

I have been running this 4-year speckle interferometry campaign at SOAR to map orbits of ~225 M dwarf multiples within 25 pc. The sample was selected using the Gaia criteria in Vrijmoet+ 2020, augmented by binaries from RECONS astrometry and the literature.

SMARTS 0.9m telescope at CTIO, where we take our data (and you could, too!)

Another useful list of links for the SMARTS 0.9m & 1.5m