X-Shooter study of accretion in $\rho$-Ophiucus: very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs

TL;DR

This study uses VLT/X-Shooter spectra to analyze accretion in very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs in rho-Ophiucus, revealing consistent accretion behavior across different regions and emphasizing the importance of accurate parameter estimation.

Contribution

It provides a detailed spectroscopic analysis of low-mass objects, showing that previous estimates of accretion rates were overestimated due to less precise photospheric parameters.

Findings

Most objects have masses below 0.6 Msun.

Accretion rates are similar across different star-forming regions.

Small scatter in Macc-M* relation supports accurate measurement methods.

Abstract

We present new VLT/X-Shooter optical and NIR spectra of a sample of 17 candidate young low-mass stars and BDs in the rho-Ophiucus cluster. We derived SpT and Av for all the targets, and then we determined their physical parameters. All the objects but one have M*<0.6 Msun, and 8 have mass below or close to the hydrogen-burning limit. Using the intensity of various emission lines present in their spectra, we determined the Lacc and Macc for all the objects. When compared with previous works targeting the same sample, we find that, in general, these objects are not as strongly accreting as previously reported, and we suggest that the reason is our more accurate estimate of the photospheric parameters. We also compare our findings with recent works in other slightly older star-forming regions to investigate possible differences in the accretion properties, but we find that the accretion properties for our targets have the same dependence on the stellar and substellar parameters as in the other regions. This leads us to conclude that we do not find evidence for a different dependence of Macc with M* when comparing low-mass stars and BDs. Moreover, we find a similar small (1 dex) scatter in the Macc-M* relation as in some of our recent works in other star-forming regions, and no significant differences in Macc due to different ages or properties of the regions. The latter result suffers, however, from low statistics and sample selection biases in the current studies. The small scatter in the Macc-M* correlation confirms that Macc in the literature based on uncertain photospheric parameters and single accretion indicators, such as the Ha width, can lead to a scatter that is unphysically large. Our studies show that only broadband spectroscopic surveys coupled with a detailed analysis of the photospheric and accretion properties allows us to properly study the evolution of disk accretion rates.