Authors
Dr.
Sydney A. Barnes
Date and time
16 Apr 2019 - 12:30 Europe/London
Address
Aula
Talk language
English
Serie number
1
Description
The rotation rate of a cool star provides an additional method beyond the usual ones to characterize and
understand its behavior. Increasingly large samples of rotation periods are now emerging from both ground-
and space-based work. This talk will present some systematic behaviors of these rotation periods, including
dependencies on age and mass, especially as probed by open cluster studies. The results suggest that it is
often possible to derive an age for a cool star (and its planets) from such rotation period measurements, via
a procedure called gyrochronology. This talk addresses the possibilities of this emerging area of work, and
also certain complexities and cautions that should be considered in this Kepler, TESS, and soon, PLATO era.