The Monitor project: rotation of low-mass stars in the open cluster NGC 2547

We report on the results of an I-band time-series photometric survey of NGC 2547 using the MPG/ESO 2.2-m telescope with Wide Field Imager, achieving better than 1 per cent photometric precision per data point over 14 ≲I≲ 18. Candidate cluster members were selected from a V versus V-I colour-magnitude diagram over 12.5 < V < 24 (covering masses from 0.9 M_⊙ down to below the brown dwarf limit), finding 800 candidates, of which we expect ~330 to be real cluster members, taking into account contamination from the field (which is most severe at the extremes of our mass range). Searching for periodic variations in these gave 176 detections over the mass range 0.1 ≲M/M_⊙≲ 0.9. The rotation period distributions were found to show a clear mass-dependent morphology, qualitatively intermediate between the distributions obtained from similar surveys in NGC 2362 and 2516, as would be expected from the age of this cluster. Models of the rotational evolution were investigated, finding that the evolution from NGC 2362 to 2547 was qualitatively reproduced (given the uncertainty in the age of NGC 2547) by solid body and core-envelope decoupled models from our earlier NGC 2516 study without need for significant modification.