X-shooter spectroscopy of young stellar objects: I – Mass accretion rates of low-mass T Tauri stars in σ Orionis?

Received...; accepted... We present high-quality, medium resolution X-shooter/VLT spectra in the range 300-2500 nm for a sample of 12 very low-mass stars in the σ Orionis cluster. The sample includes eight stars with evidence of disks from Spitzer and four without, with masses ranging from 0.08 to 0.3 M. The aim of this first paper is to investigate the reliability of the many accretion tracers currently used to measure the mass accretion rate in low-mass, young stars and the accuracy of the correlations between these secondary tracers (mainly accretion line luminosities) found in the literature. We use our spectra to measure the accretion luminosity from the continuum excess emission in the UV and visual; the derived mass accretion rates range from 10−9 M yr−1 down to 5×10−11 M yr−1, allowing us to investigate the behavior of the accretion-driven emission lines in very-low mass accretion rate regimes. We compute the luminosity of ten accretion-driven emission lines, from the UV to the near-IR, all obtained simultaneously. In general, most of the secondary tracers correlate well with the accretion luminosity derived from the continuum excess emission. We recompute the relationships between the accretion luminosities and the line luminosities, we confirm the validity of the correlations given in the literature, with the possible exception of Hα. Metallic lines, such as the CaII IR triplet or the Na I line at 589.3 nm, show a larger dispersion. Whe