The stellar activity-rotation relationship revisited: Dependence of saturated and non-saturated X-ray emission regimes on stellar mass for late-type dwarfs ^*

¹ INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Palermo, Piazza del Parlamento 1, 90134 Palermo, Italy
² INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Via Frascati 33, 00040 Monteporzio, Italy

Corresponding author: N. Pizzolato, nicola@oapa23.astropa.unipa.it

Received: 14 May 2002
Accepted: 1 October 2002

Abstract

We present the results of a new study on the relationship between coronal X-ray emission and stellar rotation in late-type main-sequence stars. We have selected a sample of 259 dwarfs in the  range 0.5–2.0, including 110 field stars and 149 members of the Pleiades, Hyades, α Persei, IC 2602 and IC 2391 open clusters. All the stars have been observed with ROSAT, and most of them have photometrically-measured rotation periods available. Our results confirm that two emission regimes exist, one in which the rotation period is a good predictor of the total X-ray luminosity, and the other in which a constant saturated X-ray to bolometric luminosity ratio is attained; we present a quantitative estimate of the critical rotation periods below which stars of different masses (or spectral types) enter the saturated regime. In this work we have also empirically derived a characteristic time scale, , which we have used to investigate the relationship between the X-ray emission level and an X-ray-based Rossby number : we show that our empirical time scale resembles the theoretical convective turnover time for , but it also has the same functional dependence on as in the color range . Our results imply that – for non-saturated coronae – the L_x – P_rot relation is equivalent to the vs. R_e relation.