Friday, February 3, 2017

Investigating the rotational evolution of very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in young clusters

Investigating the rotational evolution of very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in young clusters using Monte Carlo simulations

Authors:

Vasconcelos et al

Abstract:

Context.

Very low-mass (VLM) stars and brown dwarfs (BDs) present a different rotational behaviour from their solar mass counter-parts. Aims. We investigate the rotational evolution of young VLM stars and BDs using Monte Carlo simulations under the hypothesis of disk locking and stellar angular momentum conservation.

Methods.

We built a set of objects with masses ranging from 0.01 Mo to 0.4 Mo and considered models with single- and double- peaked initial period distributions with and without disk locking. An object is considered to be diskless when its mass accretion rate is below a given threshold.

Results.

Models with initial single-peaked period distributions reproduce the observations well given that BDs rotate faster than VLM stars. We observe a correlation between rotational period and mass when we relax the disk locking hypothesis, but with a shallower slope compared to some observational results. The angular momentum evolution of diskless stars is flatter than it is for stars with a disk which occurs because the moment of inertia of objects less massive than 0.2 Mo remains pratically constant for a time scale that increases with decreasing stellar mass.

Conclusions.

Comparing our results with the available observational data we see that disk locking is not as important in the low-mass regime and that the rotational behaviour of VLM stars and BDs is different from what is seen in their solar mass counterparts.

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