The stellar population of the solar neighborhood is obviously of special interest for an  observer at Earth. Nearby stars afford the best opportunity to study the physics of  stellar interiors and atmospheres of late-type main-sequence stars, which  are predominant  in the Milky Way and similar galaxies. However, we are far from fully exploiting the tremendous amount of information that present-day telescopes and instruments can provide for the nearest stars.

Since the advent of  Hipparcos it is possible to identify those stars that are truly nearby,  and so define complete and volume-limited  samples. S4N provides ground-based high-resolution optical spectroscopy for   118 stars in the inmediate solar neighborhood. 

All the data were collected by the end of 2001 from  McDonald Observatory, and  ESO. Point your browser to the data section to access the spectra.

The following paper provides  details of the data acquisition and reduction, as well as an analysis of the kinematics and chemical abundances:

S4N: A Spectroscopic Survey of Stars in the solar Neighborhood
C. Allende Prieto, P. S. Barklem, D. L. Lambert and K. Cunha 2004, A&A, in press

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