The Rotation Period Distribution in the Young Open Cluster NGC 6709

Abstract

Open clusters serve as a useful tool for calibrating models of the relationship between mass, rotation, and age for stars with an outer convection zone due to the homogeneity of the stars within the cluster. Cluster to cluster comparisons are essential to determine whether the universality of spin down relations holds. NGC 6709 is selected as a young open cluster for which no rotation periods of members have previously been obtained. This cluster is at a distance of over 1 kpc and has two red giant members. Isochrones place the age of the cluster at around 150 Myr, or approximately the same age as the Pleiades. Photometry is obtained over a multi-month observing season at the robotic observatory STELLA. After basic processing, PSF photometry was derived using Daophot II, and a suite of related software allowed us to create time series of relative magnitude changes for each star. Four time series analysis methods are then applied to these light curves to obtain rotation periods for members stars. We obtain for the first time rotation periods for 45 FGK cluster members of NGC 6709. We compare our rotation periods to Gaia EDR3 colors and find a slow-rotating sequence with increasing rotation periods towards redder stars and a smaller clump of rapid rotators that have not yet joined this sequence. NGC 6709 has rotation periods very similar to that of another Pleiades-age open cluster, NGC 2516.

18 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, 1 appendix with figure

References in corpus (12)

• The Gaia mission
• The generalised Lomb-Scargle periodogram. A new formalism for the floating-mean and Keplerian periodograms
• New evolutionary models for pre-main sequence and main sequence low-mass stars down to the hydrogen-burning limit
• Improved Age Estimation for Solar-Type Dwarfs Using Activity-Rotation Diagnostics
• Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters
• The Mass-Dependence of Angular Momentum Evolution in Sun-Like Stars
• Age determination for 269 $Gaia$ DR2 Open Clusters
• K2 rotation periods for low-mass Hyads and a quantitative comparison of the distribution of slow rotators in the Hyades and Praesepe
• The orbits of open clusters in the Galaxy
• A Multi-Membership Catalogue for 1876 Open Clusters using UCAC4 data
• The Gaia-ESO survey: Mixing processes in low-mass stars traced by lithium abundance in cluster and field stars
• The rotation period distribution of the rich Pleiades-age Southern open cluster NGC 2516. Existence of a representative zero-age main sequence distribution

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Stellar Rotation and Structure of the $\alpha$ Persei Complex: When Does Gyrochronology Start to Work?
• ChronoFlow: A Data-Driven Model for Gyrochronology
• 200,000+ Deep Learning-inferred Periods of Stellar Variability from the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae