The AMBRE Project: Line-broadening and stellar rotation of ESO/FEROS archived spectra

TL;DR

This study measures stellar rotational velocities from ESO/FEROS spectra for over 2,500 stars, creating a high-quality, publicly available catalog that enhances understanding of stellar rotation across various types.

Contribution

It introduces a new method for estimating line-broadening parameters from FEROS spectra and provides a comprehensive, validated catalog of stellar rotational velocities for FGKM stars.

Findings

Most stars are slow rotators, especially cool dwarfs and giants.

Several hot dwarfs and luminous stars exhibit high rotational velocities.

The catalog achieves less than 8% uncertainty in Vbroad measurements.

Abstract

Stellar rotation is a fundamental parameter in stellar studies. However, large homogeneous catalogues of rotational velocities derived from high-resolution stellar spectra are still lacking. The main objective of this work is to determine the line-broadening parameter (Vbroad), a proxy for the stellar rotational velocity, in a large sample of FGKM stars based on their ESO/FEROS spectra, previously parameterised by the AMBRE Project. Vbroad was estimated by cross-correlating the FEROS spectra with AMBRE binary masks. This methodology also relies on a specific calibration of a coupling constant between the rotational velocity and the width of the cross-correlation function. This fundamental step was performed by adopting the AMBRE grid of synthetic spectra. The derived Vbroad were then validated using data from the literature, ground-based spectroscopic surveys, and Gaia/RVS. After analysing more than 5,000 FEROS spectra (including repeated spectra for several stars), we obtained the line-broadening coefficients for 2,584 stars covering the FGKM spectral types, any stellar gravity, and metallicities between the metal-poor up to sub-solar regimes. The mean Vbroad relative uncertainty of this sample was found to be smaller than 8%. As expected, most stars were found to be slow rotators (below a few km/s), in particular, cool dwarfs and giants. However, several hot dwarfs and high-luminosity stars with high-Vbroad rates were identified, most of them not previously classified as fast rotators and/or affected by large macro-turbulent effects. The measured rotational broadening values are of high-quality and verified on the basis of literature comparisons. We publicly provide this catalogue of Vbroad parameters, including stellar atmospheric and quality parameters, for the analysed AMBRE/FEROS sources.