The Factory and the Beehive. I. Rotation Periods for Low-Mass Stars in Praesepe

Creators: Agüeros, Marcel A.; Covey, Kevin R.; Lemonias, Jenna J.; Law, Nicholas M.; Kraus, Adam; Batalha, Natasha; Bloom, Joshua S.; Cenko, S. Bradley; Kasliwal, Mansi M.; Kulkarni, Shrinivas R.; Nugent, Peter E.; Ofek, Eran O.; Poznanski, Dovi; Quimby, Robert M.

Abstract

Stellar rotation periods measured from single-age populations are critical for investigating how stellar angular momentum content evolves over time, how that evolution depends on mass, and how rotation influences the stellar dynamo and the magnetically heated chromosphere and corona. We report rotation periods for 40 late-K to mid-M star members of the nearby, rich, intermediate-age (~600 Myr) open cluster Praesepe. These rotation periods were derived from ~200 observations taken by the Palomar Transient Factory of four cluster fields from 2010 February to May. Our measurements indicate that Praesepe's mass-period relation transitions from a well-defined singular relation to a more scattered distribution of both fast and slow rotators at ~0.6 M_☉. The location of this transition is broadly consistent with expectations based on observations of younger clusters and the assumption that stellar spin-down is the dominant mechanism influencing angular momentum evolution at 600 Myr. However, a comparison to data recently published for the Hyades, assumed to be coeval to Praesepe, indicates that the divergence from a singular mass-period relation occurs at different characteristic masses, strengthening the finding that Praesepe is the younger of the two clusters. We also use previously published relations describing the evolution of rotation periods as a function of color and mass to evolve the sample of Praesepe periods in time. Comparing the resulting predictions to periods measured in M35 and NGC 2516 (~150 Myr) and for kinematically selected young and old field star populations suggests that stellar spin-down may progress more slowly than described by these relations.

Additional Information

© 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2011 June 23; accepted 2011 July 19; published 2011 October 4. We thank Sydney Barnes for detailed discussions of his models, and Mark Giampapa, Joel Hartman, Jonathan Irwin, Steve Saar, and Aleks Scholz for their useful comments on a draft of the paper. We are grateful to Janet Jacobsen for her contributions to the PTF infrastructure; without her efforts, this work would not have been possible. Finally, we thank the referee for a very prompt review of this manuscript, and for several helpful suggestions that improved it. K.R.C. and A.L.K. acknowledge support provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grants HST-HF-51253.01 and 51257.01 awarded by the STScI, which is operated by the AURA, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555. This paper is based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope as part of the Palomar Transient Factory project, a scientific collaboration between the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Las Cumbres Observatory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the University of Oxford, and the Weizmann Institute of Science. This research has made use of NASA's Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services, the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France, the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the VizieR database of astronomical catalogs (Ochsenbein et al. 2000). IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) is distributed by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, which are operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. The Two Micron All Sky Survey was a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (California Institute of Technology). The University of Massachusetts was responsible for the overall management of the project, the observing facilities, and the data acquisition. The Infrared Processing and Analysis Center was responsible for data processing, data distribution, and data archiving.

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