Origin and age of the Carina young local association

Supervisor: Nuria Miret Roig

Contact information: nuria.miret.roig@univie.ac.at kieran.leschinski@univie.ac.at

Expected duration: 9 months

Project description & Goals: 

The Young Local Associations (YLAs) are groups of co-moving young (<50 Myr) stars in the solar neighbourhood (<100 pc). Their youth and proximity offer us unique opportunities to study the formation of stars in the best resolution. Additionally, understanding their origin (including a precise age estimate) is essential for the disc and planet formation theories since many discs and exoplanets have been detected around members of YLAs. The first YLAs were detected by combining the Hipparcos astrometry and the X-Ray emission (due to their youth) from ROSAT (Zuckerman & Song 2004). However, the limited precision of Hipparcos and the lack of radial velocities prevented a detailed study of their age and origin. This picture is now changing thanks to the excellent proper motions and parallaxes of the Gaia mission and precise ground-based radial velocities. Recently, the dynamical age of beta Pictoris moving group was measured by combining Gaia astrometry and ground-based radial velocities (Miret-Roig et al. 2020). A similar sample is now ready for the Carina young association, including a set of private spectroscopic observations that are already reduced and ready to be scientifically exploited. This project aims to determine the dynamical traceback age of Carina and investigate the origin of this association in relation to other young associations and structures in the solar neighbourhood. This Master's project may become a refereed publication in a scientific journal.

Working plan & Milestones (including final thesis):

  1. Literature on the Carina young local association
  2. Introduction to the data: Gaia astrometry + ground-based radial velocities
  3. Familiarise with the methodology (orbital traceback analysis, basic Python is needed)
  4. Analysis and discussion of the results
  5. Write Master's Thesis
  6. Write a scientific article (optional)

Requirements / special skills:

Basic knowledge of Python is needed. Background on star formation and Gaia data is preferred.

References:

[1] Miret-Roig et al. 2020:https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020A%26A...642A.179M/abstract

[2] Zuckerman & Song 2004: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2004ARA%26A..42..685Z/abstract