Solar-type stars, which shed angular momentum via magnetized stellar winds, enter the main sequence with a wide range of rotational periods Prot. This initially wide range of rotational periods contracts and has mostly vanished by a stellar age $t\sim {0.6}\, {\rm Gyr}$, after which Solar-type stars spin according to the Skumanich relation $P_\text{rot}\propto \sqrt{t}$. Magnetohydrodynamic stellar wind models can improve our understanding of this convergence of rotation periods. We present wind models of 15 young Solar-type stars aged ∼24 Myr to ∼0.13 Gyr. With our previous wind models of stars aged ∼0.26 and ∼0.6 Gyr we obtain 30 consistent three-dimensional wind models of stars mapped with Zeeman–Doppler imaging – the largest such set to date. The models provide good cover of the pre-Skumanich phase of stellar spin-down in terms of rotation, magnetic field, and age. We find the mass-loss rate $\dot{M}\propto \Phi ^{{0.9\pm 0.1}}$ with a residual spread of ∼150 per cent and the wind angular momentum loss rate $\dot{J}\propto {}P_\text{rot}^{-1} \Phi ^{1.3\pm 0.2}$ with a residual spread of ∼500 per cent where Φ is the unsigned surface magnetic flux. When comparing different magnetic field scalings for each single star we find a gradual reduction in the power-law exponent with increasing magnetic field strength.
We present stellar rotation periods for late K- and early M-dwarf members of the 4 Gyr old open cluster M67 as calibrators for gyrochronology and tests of stellar spin-down models. Using Gaia EDR3 astrometry for cluster membership and Pan-STARRS (PS1) photometry for binary identification, we build this set of rotation periods from a campaign of monitoring M67 with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope’s MegaPrime wide-field imager. We identify 1807 members of M67, of which 294 are candidate single members with significant rotation period detections. Moreover, we fit a polynomial to the period versus color-derived effective temperature sequence observed in our data. We find that the rotation of very cool dwarfs can be explained by simple solid-body spin-down between 2.7 and 4 Gyr. We compare this rotational sequence to the predictions of gyrochronological models and find that the best match is Skumanich-like spin-down,
- Award ID(s):
- 1817215
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10376230
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3847
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Volume:
- 938
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0004-637X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 118
- Size(s):
- ["Article No. 118"]
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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