Power-law statistics and stellar rotational velocities in the Pleiades

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that Kaniadakis statistics better fit the observed stellar rotational velocities in the Pleiades than traditional Maxwellian models, highlighting the importance of non-Gaussian approaches in astrophysics.

Contribution

The paper introduces the application of Kaniadakis statistics to stellar rotational velocity data, showing its superiority over Maxwellian distributions in this context.

Findings

Kaniadakis statistics provide a better fit to the data.

Non-Gaussian models are more appropriate for stellar velocities.

Comparison with Maxwellian distributions highlights the differences.

Abstract

In this paper we will show that, the non-gaussian statistics framework based on the Kaniadakis statistics is more appropriate to fit the observed distributions of projected rotational velocity measurements of stars in the Pleiades open cluster. To this end, we compare the results from the $\kappa$ and $q$-distributions with the Maxwellian.