event
Tuesday 23 Mar 2021: [Journal Club] Title: The Spin Evolution of Stars in Clusters; Exploring the consequences of external photoevaporation of circumstellar disks on the rotational evolution of low mass stars
Julia Roquette - University of Exeter
Zoom 11:15-11:50
The vast majority of stars are formed in clustered environments. However, to date, most rotational evolution models still consider stars that form and evolve in isolation. In this talk, I will show results of a rotational evolution model that considers how the environment of open clusters can influence the rotational evolution of low mass stars. In particular, we looked at how the presence of massive stars influences the local far-ultraviolet radiation fields in clusters, altering the dissipation timescales of circumstellar disks due to external photoevaporation. Environmentally dependent disk-dissipation timescales directly impact the duration of the star-disk-interaction phase (sometimes called disk-locking phase), in which the star is expected to exchange angular momentum with its disk. By considering the rotational evolution of stars in clusters with varied massive star content, we show how the influence of neighbour massive stars in the disk-locking phase’s duration can drastically change the rotational evolution of low mass stars. While modelling the rotational evolution of the low mass population of entire clusters, we show that the environmental influence introduces statistically relevant differences in the period distributions of clusters with varied massive content, which are already visible at ages as early as 3 Myrs and remain until early-MS ages