English

A nonextensive view of the stellar braking indices

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-09-30 v1

Abstract

The present work is based on a description for the angular mometum loss rate due to magnetic braking for main-sequence stars on the relationship between stellar rotation and age. In general, this loss rate denoted by dJ/dt\mathrm dJ/\mathrm dt depends on angular velocity Ω\Omega in the form dJ/dtΩq\mathrm dJ/\mathrm dt\propto\Omega^{q}, where qq is a parameter extracted from nonextensive statistical mechanics. Already, in context of stellar rotation, this parameter is greater than unity and it is directly related to the braking index. For qq equal to unity, the scenario of saturation of the magnetic field is recovered, otherwise qq indicates an unsaturated field. This new approach have been proposed and investigated by de Freitas \& De Medeiros for unsaturated field stars. In present work, we propose a nonextensive approach for the stellar rotational evolution based on the Reiners \& Mohanthy model. In this sense, we developed a nonextensive version of Reiners \& Mohanthy torque and also compare this generalized version with the model proposed in de Freitas \& De Medeiros based on the spin-down Kawaler torque for the main-sequence stars with F and G spectral types. We use the same sample of 16000\sim16 000 field stars with rotational velocity vsiniv \sin i limited in age and mass. As a result, we show that the Kawaler and Reiners \& Mohanthy models exhibit strong discrepancies, mainly in relation to the domain of validity of the entropic index qq. These discrepancies are mainly due to sensitivity on the stellar radius. Finally, our results showed that modified Kawaler prescription is compatible with a wider mass range, while the Reiners \& Mohanty model is restricted to masses less than G6 stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1508.02237,
  title  = {A nonextensive view of the stellar braking indices},
  author = {D. B. de Freitas and F. J. Cavalcante and B. B. Soares and J. R. P. Silva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.02237},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure, Accepted for publication in Europhysics Letters. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1304.7644