https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/201510105006
Stellar Rotation in Kepler: Forward Modeling of the Kepler Period Distribution
1 Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science, 813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena, CA 91101
2 Department of Astronomy, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
3 Laboratoire AIM, CEA/DSM - CNRS - Univ. Paris Diderot - IRFU/SAp, Centre de Saclay, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette Cedex, France
a e-mail: jvansaders@obs.carnegiescience.edu
Published online: 23 September 2015
The Kepler mission has made it possible to detect the signatures of surface rotation in tens of thousands of stars across many different spectral types, ages, and evolutionary states. While it is tempting to use these rotation rates as a means to determine the ages of field stars in Kepler via the gyrochronology relationships, we show that 1) only a fraction of these stars should be viable targets for the existing period-age relationships due to “contamination” from hot stars and subgiants, and 2) that apparent age trends in the rotation distributions can be explained with an activity-based detection bias. We have performed a forward modeling exercise in an effort to reproduce the observed distribution of rotation periods.
© Owned by the authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2015
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
