Investigating coronal saturation and super-saturation in fast-rotating M-dwarf stars

TL;DR

This study examines coronal activity in fast-rotating M-dwarf stars, finding saturation at high activity levels but no clear evidence of super-saturation, and suggests centrifugal stripping as a possible explanation.

Contribution

It provides new observational evidence on coronal activity in M-dwarfs and challenges the universality of super-saturation in low-mass stars, supporting the centrifugal stripping model.

Findings

M-dwarfs show coronal saturation similar to higher-mass stars.

Super-saturation is not convincingly observed in M-dwarfs.

Short rotation periods are primary predictors of super-saturation.

Abstract

At fast rotation rates the coronal activity of G- and K-type stars has been observed to "saturate" and then decline again at even faster rotation rates -- a phenomenon dubbed "super-saturation". In this paper we investigate coronal activity in fast-rotating M-dwarfs using deep XMM-Newton observations of 97 low-mass stars of known rotation period in the young open cluster NGC 2547, and combine these with published X-ray surveys of low-mass field and cluster stars of known rotation period. Like G- and K-dwarfs, we find that M-dwarfs exhibit increasing coronal activity with decreasing Rossby number N_R, the ratio of period to convective turnover time, and that activity saturates at L_x/L_bol ~ 10^-3 for log N_R < -0.8. However, super-saturation is not convincingly displayed by M-dwarfs, despite the presence of many objects in our sample with log N_R < -1.8, where super-saturation is observed to occur in higher mass stars. Instead, it appears that a short rotation period is the primary predictor of super-saturation; P <=0.3d for K-dwarfs and perhaps P <=0.2d for M-dwarfs. These observations favour the "centrifugal stripping" model for super-saturation, where coronal structures are forced open or become radiatively unstable as the Keplerian co-rotation radius moves inside the X-ray emitting coronal volume.