Submitting Campus
Daytona Beach
Department
Physical Sciences
Document Type
Poster
Publication/Presentation Date
2017
Abstract/Description
Gyrochronology is the method of determining a stars age based on its rotation period and mass. A cool main sequence star loses it's angular momentum as it ages, so the rotation rate slows down. Gyrochronology has been tested on star clusters in previous studies and now we are applying the theory to binary stars. Components of a binary should be the same age, so Gyrochronology should return the same age for both stars in binary systems. We examined the rotation periods for 290 wide binary main sequence stars in the Kepler K2 fields. These observations are part of a continuing investigation of Gyrochronology. Using the determined rotation periods and color index (a proxy for mass), we estimated ages for ~20 binary pairs. Presented here is a status report on our analysis of data from the K2 and the calculated ages of the studied binaries.
Sponsorship/Conference/Institution
American Astronomical Society
Grant or Award Name
NASA grant NNX15AV60G, Florida Space Grant Consortium grant NXX15_005
Scholarly Commons Citation
Stone-Martinez, A., Villarroel, G., Majewski, P., Otani, T., Oswalt, T., & McNaughton, A. (2017). Gyrochronology of Wide Binaries in the Kepler K2 Fields. , (). Retrieved from https://commons.erau.edu/publication/1051
