Paper detail

Disk-Braking in Young Stars: Probing Rotation in Chamaeleon I and Taurus-Auriga

We present a comprehensive study of rotation, disk and accretion signatures for 144 T Tauri stars in the young (~2 Myr old) Chamaeleon I and Taurus-Auriga star forming regions based on multi-epoch high-resolution optical spectra from the Magellan Clay 6.5 m telescope supplemented by mid-infared photometry from the Spitzer Space Telescope. In contrast to previous studies in the Orion Nebula Cluster and NGC 2264, we do not see a clear signature of disk braking in Tau-Aur and Cha I. We find that both accretors and non-accretors have similar distributions of v sin i. The rotational velocities in both regions show a clear mass dependence, with F--K stars rotating on average about twice as fast as M stars, consistent with results reported for other clusters of similar age. Similarly, we find the upper envelope of the observed values of specific angular momentum j varies as M^0.5 for our sample which spans a mass range of ~0.16 to ~3 M_sun. This power law complements previous studies in Orion which estimated j is proportional to M^0.25 for < ~2 Myr stars in the same mass regime, and a sharp decline in j with decreasing mass for older stars (~10 Myr) with M < 2 M_sun. For a subsample of 67 objects with mid-IR photometry, we examine the connection between accretion signatures and dusty disks: in the vast majority of cases (63/67), the two properties correlate well, which suggests that the timescale of gas accretion is similar to the lifetime of inner disks.