Light Curve Modulation of Low Mass Stars in K2. I. Identification of 508 Fast Rotators in the Solar Neighborhood

TL;DR

This study identifies 508 fast-rotating low-mass stars in the solar neighborhood using K2 light curves, highlighting their potential as young star indicators and exploring their kinematics and UV excess characteristics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to detect fast rotators in K2 data and characterizes their properties, including potential halo stars and binary interactions.

Findings

508 fast rotators identified with periods <4 days

Fast rotators show UV excess, indicating youth

Some halo stars may be spun-up binaries

Abstract

The K2 mission is targeting large numbers of nearby (d<100 pc) GKM dwarfs selected from the SUPERBLINK proper motion survey (mu>40 mas yr^-1, V<20). Additionally, the mission is targeting low-mass, high proper motion stars associated with the local (d<500 pc) Galactic halo population also selected from SUPERBLINK. K2 campaigns 0 through 8 monitored a total of 27,382 of these cool main-sequence stars. We used the auto-correlation function to search for fast rotators by identifying short-period photometric modulations in the K2 light curves. We identified 508 candidate fast rotators with rotation periods <4 days that show light curve modulations consistent with star spots. Their kinematics show low average transverse velocities, suggesting they are part of the young disk population. A subset (13) of the fast rotators are found among those targets with colors and kinematics consistent with the local Galactic halo population and may represent stars spun up by tidal interactions in close binary systems. We further demonstrate the M dwarf fast rotators selected from the K2 light curves are significantly more likely to have UV excess, and discuss the potential of the K2 mission to identify new nearby young GKM dwarfs on the basis of their fast rotation rates. Finally, we discuss the possible use of local halo stars as fiducial, non-variable sources in the Kepler fields.