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KeplerGO / ScientificOpportunities

A repository detailing important science project ideas with Kepler & K2 archive data.
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Using rotation rates to map recent star birth #15

Open christinahedges opened 5 years ago

christinahedges commented 5 years ago

The rotation rate of stars can inform models of stellar age and identify young stars that have recently formed. Using rotation periods of the 16,000 stars in the Cygnus field observed with Kepler and Gaia parallaxes, Davenport & Covey (2018) recently reported an excess of fast-rotating, young stars at low Galactic height Z, consistent with a recent burst of star formation in the disk. The study only utilized data from Kepler’s original mission. It is possible that a similar analysis of all 20 K2 fields may reveal more clues about the recent star formation history in our Galactic neighborhood. When combined with Gaia data, such analyses may conceivably provide a spatial map of recent star birth, and perhaps reveal our Galaxy’s spiral arm density waves.

jradavenport commented 5 years ago

I believe including rotation periods from K2 will be a great advancement here, since we'll be probing many new lines of sight.

What is missing is a homogeneous rotation catalog from all K2 campaigns. Everest is often used as the "best" flavor of K2 data for rotation (though there are arguments for other sources), but there MAST only provides Everest v2 for a subset of K2 campaigns (maybe 12?) at present.

@RuthAngus and I have discussed this quite a bit, and have some funding to work on a rotation catalog.

Do others have thoughts on the best flavor of K2 data to study rotation from?

barentsen commented 5 years ago

Thank you @jradavenport!