A 4 Gyr M-dwarf Gyrochrone from CFHT/MegaPrime Monitoring of the Open Cluster M67

Dungee, Ryan; van Saders, Jennifer; Gaidos, Eric; Chun, Mark; García, Rafael A.; Magnier, Eugene A.; Mathur, Savita; Santos, Ângela R. G.
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal

Advertised on:
10
2022
Number of authors
8
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
37
Refereed citations
34
Description
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, P rot ∝ t 0.62, applied to the sequence of Ruprecht 147. This suggests that, for spectral types K7-M0 with near-solar metallicity, once a star resumes spinning down, a simple Skumanich-like relation is sufficient to describe their rotation evolution, at least through the age of M67. Additionally, for stars in the range M1-M3, our data show that spin-down must have resumed prior to the age of M67, in conflict with the predictions of the latest spin-down models.
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