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Disentangling rotational velocity distribution of stars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2017

Michel Curé
Affiliation:
Universidad de Valparaíso, Chile
Diego F. Rial
Affiliation:
Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina
Julia Cassetti
Affiliation:
Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Argentina
Alejandra Christen
Affiliation:
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile
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Abstract

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Rotational speed is an important physical parameter of stars: knowing the distribution of stellar rotational velocities is essential for understanding stellar evolution. However, rotational speed cannot be measured directly and is instead the convolution between the rotational speed and the sine of the inclination angle vsin(i). The problem itself can be described via a Fredhoml integral of the first kind. A new method (Curé et al. 2014) to deconvolve this inverse problem and obtain the cumulative distribution function for stellar rotational velocities is based on the work of Chandrasekhar & Münch (1950). Another method to obtain the probability distribution function is Tikhonov regularization method (Christen et al. 2016). The proposed methods can be also applied to the mass ratio distribution of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs (in binary systems, Curé et al. 2015).

For stars in a cluster, where all members are gravitationally bounded, the standard assumption that rotational axes are uniform distributed over the sphere is questionable. On the basis of the proposed techniques a simple approach to model this anisotropy of rotational axes has been developed with the possibility to “disentangling” simultaneously both the rotational speed distribution and the orientation of rotational axes.

Type
Contributed Papers
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2017 

References

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