Bridging the gap—the disappearance of the intermediate period gap for fully convective stars, uncovered by new ZTF rotation periods

Y Lu, JL Curtis, R Angus, TJ David… - The Astronomical …, 2022 - iopscience.iop.org
The Astronomical Journal, 2022iopscience.iop.org
The intermediate period gap, discovered by Kepler, is an observed dearth of stellar rotation
periods in the temperature–period diagram at∼ 20 days for G dwarfs and up to∼ 30 days
for early-M dwarfs. However, because Kepler mainly targeted solar-like stars, there is a lack
of measured periods for M dwarfs, especially those at the fully convective limit. Therefore it is
unclear if the intermediate period gap exists for mid-to late-M dwarfs. Here, we present a
period catalog containing 40,553 rotation periods (9535 periods> 10 days), measured using …
Abstract
The intermediate period gap, discovered by Kepler, is an observed dearth of stellar rotation periods in the temperature–period diagram at ∼20 days for G dwarfs and up to ∼30 days for early-M dwarfs. However, because Kepler mainly targeted solar-like stars, there is a lack of measured periods for M dwarfs, especially those at the fully convective limit. Therefore it is unclear if the intermediate period gap exists for mid- to late-M dwarfs. Here, we present a period catalog containing 40,553 rotation periods (9535 periods >10 days), measured using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). To measure these periods, we developed a simple pipeline that improves directly on the ZTF archival light curves and reduces the photometric scatter by 26%, on average. This new catalog spans a range of stellar temperatures that connect samples from Kepler with MEarth, a ground-based time-domain survey of bright M dwarfs, and reveals that the intermediate period gap closes at the theoretically predicted location of the fully convective boundary (G BPG RP ∼ 2.45 mag). This result supports the hypothesis that the gap is caused by core–envelope interactions. Using gyro-kinematic ages, we also find a potential rapid spin-down of stars across this period gap.
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