New Parallaxes and a Convergence Analysis for the TW Hya Association

TL;DR

This study provides new parallax measurements for 14 stars in the TW Hya Association, analyzes their kinematics to assess past convergence, and estimates the group's age at approximately 7.9 million years, refining membership and dynamical understanding.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive parallax data for multiple TWA members, performs a detailed convergence analysis, and refines the association's age and membership list.

Findings

Average age of TWA is 7.9 ± 1.0 Myr.

The association has not significantly converged in the past.

Two new candidate members identified with high probability.

Abstract

The TW Hya Association (TWA) is a nearby stellar association with an age of $\sim$ 5-10 Myr. This is an important age for studying the late stages of star and planet formation. We measure the parallaxes of 14 candidate members of TWA. That brings to 38 the total number of individual stars with fully measured kinematics, i.e. proper motion, radial velocity, and parallax, to describe their motions through the Galaxy. We analyze these kinematics to search for convergence to a smaller volume in the past, but we find the association is never much more compact than it is at present. We show that it is difficult to measure traceback ages for associations such as TWA that have expected velocity dispersions of 1-2 km s$^{-1}$ with typical measurement uncertainties. We also use our stellar distances and pre-main-sequence evolutionary tracks to find the average age of the association of 7.9 $\pm$ 1.0 Myr. Additionally, our parallax measurement of TWA 32 indicates it should be considered a bona fide member of TWA. Two new candidate members have high membership probabilities, and we assign them TWA numbers: TWA 45 for 2MASS J11592786-4510192 and TWA 46 for 2MASS J12354615-4115531.