Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The Third Catalogue of Nearby Stars (Gliese to establish radial velocities accurate to ±10 km s-1 for all stars confirmed as late-type dwarfs; to determine spectral types and absolute magnitudes from the TiO bandstrength, allowing more accurate distance estimates for stars with inaccurate (or no) trigonometric parallax measurements; and to identify stars with Ha emission (chromospherically active stars) and with strong CaH absorption (perhaps including some metal-poor disk subdwarfs). We have determined the nearby-star luminosity function from complete samples derived by applying both the distance limits defined by Wielen (1974) and by using limits derived from our own analysis. In both cases, we find good agreement with Wielen's results to MV ∼+11, but lower densities at the maximum (MV∼+12). The latter analysis results in a luminosity function, ΦCNS, which closely matches photometric parallax analyses for MVV>+14 -- we do not recover the apparent excess of low-luminosity stars inferred from analysis of the 5 pc sample. However, ΦCNS does lie below Φphot at the peak (MV∼12), and we suggest that this offset is caused by the inclusion of unrecognized binaries in the photometric surveys. We have also reanalyzed the local stellar kinematics using the complete sample and find that the velocity distributions show significant departures from single Gaussian velocity dispersions.
Reid et al. (Sun,) studied this question.