Wrinkles in Time. I. Rapid Rotators Found in High-eccentricity Orbits

Abstract

Recent space-based missions have ushered in a new era of observational astronomy, where high-cadence photometric light curves for thousands to millions of stars in the solar neighborhood can be used to test and apply stellar age-dating methods, including gyrochronology. Combined with precise kinematics, these data allow for powerful new insights into our understanding of the Milky Way’s dynamical history. Using TESS data, we build a series of rotation period measurement and confirmation pipelines and test them on 1560 stars across five benchmark samples: the Pleiades, Pisces–Eridanus, Praesepe, the Hyades, and field stars from the MEarth Project. Our pipelines’ recovery rates across these groups are, on average, 89%. We then apply these pipelines to 4085 likely single stars with TESS light curves in two interesting regions of Galactic action space. We identify 141 unique, rapidly rotating stars in highly eccentric orbits in the disk, some of which appear as rotationally young as the 120 Myr old Pleiades. Pending spectroscopic analysis to confirm their youth, this indicates that these stars were subject to fast-acting dynamical phenomena, the origin of which will be investigated in later papers in this series.