Fast Star, Slow Star; Old Star, Young Star: Subgiant Rotation as a Population and Stellar Physics Diagnostic

TL;DR

This paper investigates stellar rotation periods across different evolutionary stages, revealing distinct regimes and proposing new diagnostic tools for stellar age, radius, and mass, especially focusing on subgiant stars and their rotation behaviors.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical framework for understanding rotation period distributions in stellar populations, highlighting the importance of subgiant contamination in gyrochronology and introducing new rotation-based diagnostics.

Findings

Cool stars fall into three rotation regimes: rapid, intermediate, and slow rotators.

Subgiants exhibit distinct rotation period ranges, useful for age and radius diagnostics.

The high-mass/low-mass break in rotation persists into the subgiant phase.

Abstract

Stellar rotation is a strong function of both mass and evolutionary state. Missions such as Kepler and CoRoT provide tens of thousands of rotation periods, drawn from stellar populations that contain objects at a range of masses, ages, and evolutionary states. Given a set of reasonable starting conditions and a prescription for angular momentum loss, we address the expected range of rotation periods for cool field stellar populations. We find that cool stars fall into three distinct regimes in rotation. Rapid rotators with surface periods less than 10 days are either young low-mass main sequence (MS) stars, or higher mass subgiants which leave the MS with high rotation rates. Intermediate rotators (10-40 days) can be either cool MS dwarfs, suitable for gyrochronology, or crossing subgiants at a range of masses. Gyrochronology relations must therefore be applied cautiously, since there is an abundant population of subgiant contaminants. The slowest rotators, at periods greater than 40 days, are lower mass subgiants undergoing envelope expansion. We identify additional diagnostic uses of rotation periods. There exists a period-age relation for subgiants distinct from the MS period-age relations. There is also a period-radius relation that can be used as a constraint on the stellar radius, particularly in the interesting case of planet host stars. The high-mass/low-mass break in the rotation distribution on the MS persists onto the subgiant branch, and has potential as a diagnostic of stellar mass. Finally, this set of theoretical predictions can be compared to extensive datasets to motivate improved modeling.