The winds of young Solar-type stars in the Pleiades, AB Doradus, Columba, and β Pictoris
Dag Evensberget, S. C. Marsden, Brad Carter, Raquel Salmeron, A. A. Vidotto, C. P. Folsom, Robert D. Kavanagh, J. Sebastian Pineda, F. A. Driessen, K. Markus Strickert
Abstract
ABSTRACT Solar-type stars, which shed angular momentum via magnetized stellar winds, enter the main sequence with a wide range of rotational periods Prot. This initially wide range of rotational periods contracts and has mostly vanished by a stellar age $t\sim {0.6}\, {\rm Gyr}$, after which Solar-type stars spin according to the Skumanich relation $P_\text{rot}\propto \sqrt{t}$. Magnetohydrodynamic stellar wind models can improve our understanding of this convergence of rotation periods. We present wind models of 15 young Solar-type stars aged ∼24 Myr to ∼0.13 Gyr. With our previous wind models of stars aged ∼0.26 and ∼0.6 Gyr we obtain 30 consistent three-dimensional wind models of stars mapped with Zeeman–Doppler imaging – the largest such set to date. The models provide good cover of the pre-Skumanich phase of stellar spin-down in terms of rotation, magnetic field, and age. We find the mass-loss rate $\dot{M}\propto \Phi ^{{0.9\pm 0.1}}$ with a residual spread of ∼150 per cent and the wind angular momentum loss rate $\dot{J}\propto {}P_\text{rot}^{-1} \Phi ^{1.3\pm 0.2}$ with a residual spread of ∼500 per cent where Φ is the unsigned surface magnetic flux. When comparing different magnetic field scalings for each single star we find a gradual reduction in the power-law exponent with increasing magnetic field strength.