IU astronomy Ph.D. student Laurin Gray and IU Professor Katherine Rhode, along with their collaborators, have recently published a study of rotation velocities in young, low-mass stars in the open star cluster NGC 2264. These stars will one day grow up to be similar to our own Sun, but right now they're only 3 million years old- practically newborns by stellar timescales! By studying stars in the early stages of their evolution, we can learn more about the processes that helped form our Solar System billions of years ago.
Laurin and her collaborators used high resolution spectra from the WIYN 3.5m telescope to measure rotation velocities for over 200 stars in NGC 2264. They combined these measurements with previously published information about the stars to investigate how different characteristics could affect stellar rotation. For example, they found that stars which are actively accumulating material from a protoplanetary disk may rotate more slowly than stars which do not have a disk, and that stars which are in binary systems may rotate faster than stars which are by themselves. They also combined their rotation velocities with rotation period measurements to estimate the radius of the stars, and compared those estimates to predictions from stellar evolution models. They found that the models which included the effects of starspots (cooler spots on the surface of magnetically active stars) had the best match to the stars' observed radii.
Laurin's paper is available now in The Astrophysical Journal.
And the link: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ad924b
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