The impact of stellar rotation on the morphology of star cluster colour-magnitude diagrams is widely acknowledged. However, the physics driving the distribution of the equatorial rotation velocities of main-sequence turn-off (MSTO) stars is as yet poorly understood. Using Gaia Data Release 2 photometry and new Southern African Large Telescope medium-resolution spectroscopy, we analyse the intermediate-age (∼1Gyr-old) Galactic open clusters NGC 3960, NGC 6134 and IC 4756 and develop a novel method to derive their stellar rotation distributions based on SYCLIST stellar rotation models. Combined with literature data for the open clusters NGC 5822 and NGC 2818, we find a tight correlation between the number ratio of slow rotators and the clusters' binary fractions. The blue-main-sequence stars in at least two of our clusters are more centrally concentrated than their red-main-sequence counterparts. The origin of the equatorial stellar rotation distribution and its evolution remains as yet unidentified. However, the observed correlation in our open cluster sample suggests a binary-driven formation mechanism.
@article{arxiv.2102.02352,
title = {Binary-driven stellar rotation evolution at the main-sequence turn-off in star clusters},
author = {Weijia Sun and Richard de Grijs and Licai Deng and Michael D. Albrow},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.02352},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
9 pages, 7 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRAS