Dynamical Masses and Stellar Evolutionary Model Predictions of M-Stars

Abstract

In this era of Gaia and ALMA, dynamical stellar mass measurements provide benchmarks that are independent of observations of stellar characteristics and their uncertainties. These benchmarks can then be used to validate and improve stellar evolutionary models, which can lead to both imprecise and inaccurate mass predictions for pre-main-sequence, low-mass stars. We present the dynamical stellar masses derived from disks around three M-stars (FP Tau, J0432+1827, and J1100-7619) using ALMA observations of ${}^{12}$CO (J=2--1) and ${}^{13}$CO (J=2--1) emission. These are the first dynamical stellar mass measurements for J0432+1827 and J1100-7619 and the most precise measurement for FP Tau. Fiducial stellar evolutionary model tracks, which do not include any treatment of magnetic activity, agree with the dynamical measurement of J0432+1827 but underpredict the mass by $\sim$60\% for FP Tau and $\sim$80\% for J1100-7619. Possible explanations for the underpredictions include inaccurate assumptions of stellar effective temperature, undetected binarity for J1100-7619, and that fiducial stellar evolutionary models are not complex enough to represent these stars. In the former case, the stellar effective temperatures would need to be increased by $\sim$40K to $\sim$340K to reconcile the fiducial model predictions with the dynamically-measured masses. In the latter case, we show that the dynamical masses can be reproduced using results from stellar evolutionary models with starspots, which incorporate fractional starspot coverage to represent the manifestation of magnetic activity. Folding in low-mass M-stars from the literature and assuming that the stellar effective temperatures are imprecise but accurate, we find tentative evidence of a relationship between fractional starspot coverage and observed effective temperature for these young, cool stars.

arXiv comment37 pages (14 pages in the main document, 23 pages in the appendix), 35 figures, 5 tables. Accepted in ApJ (December 2020)

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