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Variability in young very low mass stars : two surprises from spectrophotometric monitoring

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Bozhinova_2016_VeryLowMassStars_MNRAS_FinalPubVersion.pdf (11.27Mb)
Date
21/05/2016
Author
Bozhinova, Inna Nikolaeva
Scholz, Alexander
Eislöffel, J.
Keywords
Brown dwarfs
Stars: low-mass
Stars: pre-main-sequence
Stars: variables: T Tauri
QB Astronomy
QC Physics
NDAS
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Abstract
We present simultaneous photometric and spectroscopic observations of seven young and highly variable M dwarfs in star-forming regions in Orion, conducted in four observing nights with FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph2 at European Southern Observatory/VLT. All seven targets show significant photometric variability in the I band, with amplitudes between 0.1–0.8 mag, The spectra, however, remain remarkably constant, with spectral type changes less than 0.5 subtypes. Thus, the brightness changes are not caused by veiling that ‘fills in’ absorption features. Three objects in the σ Ori cluster (age ∼3 Myr) exhibit strong Hα emission and Hα variability, in addition to the continuum variations. Their behaviour is mostly consistent with the presence of spots with temperature of ∼300 K above the photosphere and filling factors between 0.2–0.4, in contrast to typical hotspots observed in more massive stars. The remaining targets near ϵ Ori, likely to be older, show eclipse-like light curves, no significant Hα activity and are better represented by variable extinction due to circumstellar material. Interestingly, two of them show no evidence of infrared excess emission. Our study shows that high-amplitude variability in young very low mass stars can be caused by different phenomena than in more massive T Tauri stars and can persist when the disc has disappeared and accretion has ceased.
Citation
Bozhinova , I N , Scholz , A & Eislöffel , J 2016 , ' Variability in young very low mass stars : two surprises from spectrophotometric monitoring ' , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , vol. 458 , no. 3 , pp. 3118-3133 . https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw455
Publication
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw455
ISSN
0035-8711
Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at: https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw455
Description
The authors acknowledge support from the Science & Technology Facilities Council through grants no. ST/K502339/1 and ST/M001296/1.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/8596

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