Accretion-rotation connection in NGC 2264

This may be associated with magnetospheric accretion and star-disk interaction, as suggested by observations that disk-bearing objects (CTTS) are slower rotators than diskless sources (WTTS) in young star clusters.

We characterize the rotation properties for members of the star-forming region NGC 2264 (~3Myr) as a function of mass, and investigate the accretion-rotation connection at an age where about 50% of the stars have already lost their disks. We examined a sample of 500 cluster members (40% with disks, 60% without disks), distributed in mass between ~0.15 and 2M_{sun}_, whose photometric variations were monitored in the optical for 38 consecutive days with the CoRoT space observatory.