Talk

Rotation, magnetic braking and metallicity

Louis Amard, University of Exeter

The significant convective envelope of low-mass stars is able to generate relatively strong, large scale magnetic fields. Coupled to the stellar winds, it leads the star to lose angular momentum and thus to spin down during their entire main sequence lifetime. Various descriptions of that magnetic braking have been developed with different assumptions. With a database of accurate rotation periods larger everyday and a more and more diverse stellar population, it is particularly timely to ask ourselves how different chemical compositions may affect the rotational evolution. I will describe the effect of different chemical composition on the spin evolution of low-mass stars and show how sensitive it can be to metallicity. We also propose to disentangle some of the most recent angular momentum loss description by taking into account the effect of stellar metallicity on the rotational evolution.