Rotation, differential rotation, and gyrochronology of active Kepler stars

TL;DR

This study analyzes Kepler star rotation periods to estimate stellar ages, investigate differential rotation, and explore activity-age relations, revealing bimodal age distributions and stable rotation periods possibly linked to companions or magnetic activity.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive re-analysis of Kepler star rotation data using multiple methods, deriving ages for thousands of stars and exploring differential rotation and activity correlations.

Findings

Over 18,500 stars show consistent rotation periods with previous studies.

More than 12,300 stars exhibit multiple peaks indicating differential rotation.

A bimodal age distribution is observed for stars with 3200-4700 K temperature.

Abstract

The high-precision photometry from the CoRoT and Kepler satellites has led to measurements of surface rotation periods for tens of thousands of stars. Our main goal is to derive ages of thousands of field stars using consistent rotation period measurements in different gyrochronology relations. Multiple rotation periods are interpreted as surface differential rotation (DR). We re-analyze the sample of 24,124 Kepler stars from Reinhold et al. (2013) using different approaches based on the Lomb-Scargle periodogram. Each quarter (Q1-Q14) is treated individually using a prewhitening approach. Additionally, the full time series, and different segments thereof are analyzed. For more than 18,500 stars our results are consistent with the rotation periods from McQuillan et al. (2014). Thereof, more than 12,300 stars show multiple significant peaks, which we interpret as DR. Gyrochronology ages between 100 Myr and 10 Gyr were derived for more than 17,000 stars using different gyrochronology relations. We find a bimodal age distribution for Teff between 3200-4700 K. The derived ages reveal an empirical activity-age relation using photometric variability as stellar activity proxy. Additionally, we found 1079 stars with extremely stable (mostly short) periods. Half of these periods may be associated with rotation stabilized by non-eclipsing companions, the other half might be due to pulsations. The derived gyrochronology ages are well constrained since more than 93.0 % of the stars seem to be younger than the Sun where calibration is most reliable. Explaining the bimodality in the age distribution is challenging, and limits accurate stellar age predictions. The existence of cool stars with almost constant rotation period over more than three years of observation might be explained by synchronization with stellar companions, or a dynamo mechanism keeping the spot configurations extremely stable.