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Description
The low spin rates measured for solar-type stars at an age of a few Myr (~10% of the break-up velocity) indicate that some mechanism of angular momentum regulation must be at play in the early pre-main sequence. This may be associated with magnetospheric accretion and star-disk interaction, as suggested by observations that disk-bearing objects (CTTS) are slower rotators than diskless sources (WTTS) in young star clusters. We characterize the rotation properties for members of the star-forming region NGC 2264 (~3Myr) as a function of mass, and investigate the accretion-rotation connection at an age where about 50% of the stars have already lost their disks. We examined a sample of 500 cluster members (40% with disks, 60% without disks), distributed in mass between ~0.15 and 2M_{sun}_, whose photometric variations were monitored in the optical for 38 consecutive days with the CoRoT space observatory. Light curves were analyzed for periodicity using three different techniques: the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, the autocorrelation function and the string-length method. Periods were searched in the range between 0.17-days (i.e., 4h, twice the data sampling adopted) and 19-days (half the total time span). Period detections were confirmed using a variety of statistical tools (false alarm probability, Q-statistics), as well as visual inspection of the direct and phase-folded light curves.
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