Lithium Depletion in the Beta Pictoris Moving Group

Details Lithium Depletion in the Beta Pictoris Moving Group Lithium Depletion in the Beta Pictoris Moving Group

Dec 2006

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2006aas...209.3006y&link_type=abstract

2007 AAS/AAPT Joint Meeting, American Astronomical Society Meeting 209, #30.06; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, V

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

We present a study of lithium depletion in twelve late-type pre-main-sequence stars in the coeval Beta Pictoris Moving Group (BPMG). The age of this group ( 12 Myr) is well constrained because all of the stars in the sample have Hipparcos distances. We have determined Li abundances for these K and M stars using equivalent width measurements of the 6707.8 Angstrom Li I line from new high-resolution, high-S/N echelle spectra, and we compare these abundances to models of pre-main-sequence Li depletion by Baraffe et al. (1998), D'Antona & Mazzitelli (1997, 1998), and Siess, Dufour, & Forestini (2000). Significantly more lithium depletion is observed in the sample than is predicted for a group of this age. In particular, the discrepancy between the predicted and the observed lithium abundances increases with decreasing effective temperature, suggesting a problem with theories describing pre-main-sequence lithium depletion. Our data indicate that M stars deplete lithium more rapidly than predicted, which could make M-type post-T-Tauri stars difficult to identify. In addition, we compare our results to the work of Song, Bessell, & Zuckerman (2002) on HIP 112312. In contrast to that work, we did not observe the lithium depletion boundary of the BPMG; none of the three M4.5 stars in the sample showed evidence of lithium (log N(Li) < -0.5), indicating a lithium depletion boundary later than M4.5, further underscoring the gap between age estimates from lithium depletion and those from theoretical evolutionary tracks.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation through grant AST-0307830.

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