Astronomy Tea Talk

Since the 1970s Sun-like stars have been shown to follow "Skumanich relations", a well documented relationship between the age of the star and its rotation period. As more clusters and populations have been observed, the field of Gyrochronology has emerged to describe this loss of angular momentum over time, with the goal of creating an empirically calibrated age dating technique across many spectral types. While there has been great progress made, there are still some regimes in which gyrochronology struggles. These include long-lived and uniquely structured M dwarfs, as well as adolescent young (tens of Myr) stars. I will describe my work on three projects that dive head first into these regimes, and use rotation periods, activity indicators including H-alpha EW, and gaia kinematics to make the best of these "worst case" scenarios.