Stellar properties for M dwarfs in MEarth-South

Building on our previous work in the northern hemisphere, we have used long-term, ground-based photometric monitoring from the MEarth Observatory to measure 234 rotation periods for nearby, southern hemisphere M dwarfs. Notable examples include the exoplanet hosts GJ 1132, LHS 1140, and Proxima Centauri.

We find excellent agreement between our data and K2 photometry for the overlapping subset. Among the sample of stars with the highest quality data sets, we recover periods in 66%; as the length of the data set increases, our recovery rate approaches 100%. The longest rotation periods we detect are around 140 days, which we suggest represent the periods that are reached when M dwarfs are as old as the local thick disk (about 9 Gyr).