Towards a unified model of stellar rotation II: Model-dependent characteristics of stellar populations

TL;DR

This paper compares different stellar evolution models to understand how rotation influences stellar populations, focusing on physical effects like chemical mixing, surface changes, and mass loss, to aid in model differentiation.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of model-dependent stellar population characteristics influenced by rotation, highlighting features that distinguish various physical formulations.

Findings

Rotation affects surface temperature and luminosity.

Different models produce distinct chemical surface abundance patterns.

Rotation influences mass loss rates and stellar lifetimes.

Abstract

Rotation has a number of important effects on the evolution of stars. Apart from structural changes because of the centrifugal force, turbulent mixing and meridional circulation caused by rotation can dramatically affect a star's chemical evolution. This leads to changes in the surface temperature and luminosity as well as modifying its lifetime. Observationally rotation decreases the surface gravity, causes enhanced mass loss and leads to surface abundance anomalies of various chemical isotopes. The replication of these physical effects with simple stellar evolution models is very difficult and has resulted in the use of numerous different formulations to describe the physics. Using stellar evolution calculations based on several physical models we discuss the features of the resulting simulated stellar populations which can help to distinguish between the models.