ON THE ANGULAR MOMENTUM EVOLUTION OF FULLY CONVECTIVE STARS: ROTATION PERIODS FOR FIELD M-DWARFS FROM THE MEarth TRANSIT SURVEY

By J. Irwin, Z. K. Berta, C. Burke, D. Charbonneau, P. Nutzman, Andrew A. West, Emilio E. Falco. 2010

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present rotation period measurements for 41 field M-dwarfs, all of which have masses inferred (from their parallaxes and Two Micron All Sky Survey K-band magnitudes) to be between the hydrogen burning limit and 0.35 M☉ and thus should remain fully convective throughout their lifetimes. We measure a wide range of rotation periods, from 0.28 to 154 days, with the latter commensurate with the typical sensitivity limit of our observations. Using kinematics as a proxy for age, we find that the majority of objects likely to be thick disk or halo members (and hence, on average, older) rotate very slowly, with a median period of 92 days, compared with 0.7 days for those likely to be thin disk members (on average, younger), although there are still some rapid rotators in the thick disk sample. When combined with literature measurements for M-dwarfs, these results indicate an increase in spin-down times with decreasing stellar mass, in agreement with previous work, and that the spin-down time becomes comparable to the age of the thick disk sample below the fully convective boundary. We additionally infer that the spin-down must remove a substantial amount of angular momentum once it begins in order to produce the slow rotators we observe in the thick disk candidates, suggesting that fully convective M-dwarfs may still experience strong winds.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86f013d756d05e1868e16c173377c7f9f227479c

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Citations in the corpus

A CATALOG OF ROTATION AND ACTIVITY IN EARLY-M STARS (2012, methodology): “Irwin et al. (2011) provide radius estimates for their targets.”
KEPLER FLARES. I. ACTIVE AND INACTIVE M DWARFS (2014, background): “Starspots on M dwarfs have previously been difficult to measure due to the very small amplitudes (< 0.01 mag) that are typically observed (Irwin et al. 2011).”
PLANETS AROUND LOW-MASS STARS (PALMS). IV. THE OUTER ARCHITECTURE OF M DWARF PLANETARY SYSTEMS (2014, background): “The HATNet survey measured a fast rotation period of 0.475 days for the primary (Hartman et al. 2011); unfortunately, rotation periods become unreliable age indicators for stars that are fully convective (Irwin et al. 2011).”
TRANSIT DETECTION IN THE MEarth SURVEY OF NEARBY M DWARFS: BRIDGING THE CLEAN-FIRST, SEARCH-LATER DIVIDE (2012, methodology): “We also indicate the longperiod low-mass eclipsing binary LSPM J1112+7626 (Irwin et al. 2011b), which was detected at very high significance (30σ) with the real-time detection trigger.”
The Formation and Early Evolution of Low-Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs (2012, background): “Measurements for older brown dwarfs in the field indicate that they do eventually spin down, but on much longer timescales than stars (Blake, Charbonneau & Russel 2010; Irwin et al. 2011; Mohanty & Basri 2003; Reiners & Basri 2008; Scholz et al. 2011; Zapatero Osorio et al. 2006).”
Improved angular momentum evolution model for solar-like stars II. Exploring the mass dependence (2015, unknown): “…decade, thanks to a number of dedicated long-term monitoring studies of nearby populations (see e.g. Irwin & Bouvier 2009; Hartman et al. 2010; Agüeros et al. 2011; Meibom et al. 2011a; Irwin et al. 2011; A ﬀ er et al. 2012, 2013; Bouvier et al. 2014; Gallet & Bouvier 2013; McQuillan et al. 2014).”
Improved angular momentum evolution model for solar-like stars (2013, background): “…complete rotational distributions for thousands of low mass stars in young open clusters and in the field, covering an age range from 1 Myr to about 10 Gyr (see, e.g., Irwin & Bouvier 2009; Hartman et al. 2010; Agüeros et al. 2011; Meibom et al. 2011; Irwin et al. 2011; Affer et al. 2012, 2013).”
ROTATION PERIODS OF 34,030 KEPLER MAIN-SEQUENCE STARS: THE FULL AUTOCORRELATION SAMPLE (2014, background): “…H-K project (Baliunas et al. 1996, and references therein), 1727 midF to mid-K stars observed by the CoRoT satellite (Affer et al. 2012), 41 low-mass (0.1–0.3M⊙) stars from the MEarth survey (Irwin et al. 2011), and ∼ 2000 field K and M stars observed by the HATNet survey (Hartman et al. 2011).”
TIME-RESOLVED PROPERTIES AND GLOBAL TRENDS IN dMe FLARES FROM SIMULTANEOUS PHOTOMETRY AND SPECTRA (2013, background): “It is known to be an active star (Gizis et al. 2002) of spectral type dM4e, and its long baseline photometric starspot activity was recently measured by Irwin et al. (2011).”
TESTING A PREDICTIVE THEORETICAL MODEL FOR THE MASS LOSS RATES OF COOL STARS (2011, background): “0.35M⊙) are likely to be fully convective, and thus their dynamos are likely to be driven by fundamentally different processes than exist in more massive stars (Mullan & MacDonald 2001; Reiners & Basri 2007; Irwin et al. 2011).”
Rotation and differential rotation of active Kepler stars (2013, background): “Filled circles represent data from Baliunas et al. (1996) (olive), Kiraga & Stepien (2007) (purple), and Irwin et al. (2011) (red).”
The stellar rotation–activity relationship in fully convective M dwarfs (2018, methodology): “21 targets were chosen from the MEarth sample that had rotation periods measured by Irwin et al. (2011) and Newton et al. (2016, 2018).”
THE Hα EMISSION OF NEARBY M DWARFS AND ITS RELATION TO STELLAR ROTATION (2016, background): “Our observations often span 6 months or longer, providing excellent sensitivity to long periods (Irwin et al. 2011; Newton et al. 2016).”
CHARACTERIZING THE COOL KOIs. III. KOI 961: A SMALL STAR WITH LARGE PROPER MOTION AND THREE SMALL PLANETS (2012, background): “Such slow rotation is consistent with KOI 961 being an older mid-M dwarf (> 1-2 Gyr, Figure 12 from Irwin et al. 2011a); however, the low V sin(i) measurement does not constrain the age as well as the lack of H-α (> 4.5 Gyr), or the kinematic properties (see Section 3).”
HAZMAT. I. THE EVOLUTION OF FAR-UV AND NEAR-UV EMISSION FROM EARLY M STARS (2014, background): “The large spread in the measured rotation periods of M stars at both young and old ages (e.g., Irwin et al. 2011, and references therein) must also contribute to the UV flux variation, although Pizzolato et al. (2003) showed that young stars with saturationlevel X-ray emission do not follow the…”
Measuring the rotation period distribution of field M dwarfs with Kepler (2013, methodology): “Notable exceptions include 71 main sequence F, G and K stars observed as part of the Mount Wilson HK project (Barnes 2003), 1727 mid-F to mid-K stars observed by the CoRoT satellite (Affer et al. 2012), and 41 low mass (0.1–0.3M⊙) stars from theMEarth survey (Irwin et al. 2011).”
NEAR-INFRARED METALLICITIES, RADIAL VELOCITIES, AND SPECTRAL TYPES FOR 447 NEARBY M DWARFS (2013, background): “Irwin et al. (2011b) presented a long period M dwarf-M dwarf eclipsing binary and measured the masses of the two components and the sum of their radii.”
THE SOLAR NEIGHBORHOOD. XXXVII. THE MASS–LUMINOSITY RELATION FOR MAIN-SEQUENCE M DWARFS (2016, background): “Spots on the surfaces of M dwarfs reveal the presence of magnetic fields, and can be used to measure rotation periods of days to months (Benedict et al. 1998; Irwin et al. 2011).”
KEPLER FLARES. II. THE TEMPORAL MORPHOLOGY OF WHITE-LIGHT FLARES ON GJ 1243 (2014, methodology): “A rapid rotation period of P = 0.592 days was established from light curve modulations by two starspots in the first release of Kepler data (Savanov & Dmitrienko 2011), and independently discovered from ground-based data by Irwin et al. (2011).”