PLATO as it is: a legacy mission for Galactic archaeology

By A. Miglio, C. Chiappini, B. Mosser, G. Davies, Kenneth C. Freeman, L. Girardi, Paulina Jofré, Daisuke Kawata, B. Rendle, M. Valentini and 95 more. 2017

62 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Deciphering the assembly history of the Milky Way is a formidable task, which becomes possible only if one can produce high-resolution chrono-chemo-kinematical maps of the Galaxy. Data from large-scale astrometric and spectroscopic surveys will soon provide us with a well-defined view of the current chemo-kinematical structure of the Milky Way, but will only enable a blurred view on the temporal sequence that led to the present-day Galaxy. As demonstrated by the (ongoing) exploitation of data from the pioneering photometric missions CoRoT, Kepler, and K2, asteroseismology provides the way forward: solar-like oscillating giants are excellent evolutionary clocks thanks to the availability of seismic constraints on their mass and to the tight age-initial-mass relation they adhere to. In this paper we identify five key outstanding questions relating to the formation and evolution of the Milky Way that will need precise and accurate ages for large samples of stars to be addressed, and we identify the requirements in terms of number of targets and the precision on the stellar properties that are needed to tackle such questions. By quantifying the asteroseismic yields expected from PLATO for red-giant stars, we demonstrate that these requirements are within the capabilities of the current instrument design, provided that observations are sufficiently long to identify the evolutionary state and allow robust and precise determination of acoustic-mode frequencies. This will allow us to harvest data of sufficient quality to reach a 10% precision in age. This is a fundamental pre-requisite to then reach the more ambitious goal of a similar level of accuracy, which will only be possible if we have to hand a careful appraisal of systematic uncertainties on age deriving from our limited understanding of stellar physics, a goal which conveniently falls within the main aims of PLATO's core science.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, background): “Age information is by far the hardest one to obtain, yet extremely important to break degeneracies among different chemical evolution models (Miglio et al. 2017).”
Estimating stellar birth radii and the time evolution of Milky Way’s ISM metallicity gradient (2018, background): “(2018) Miglio et al. 2017) will help differentiate between the two scenarios, by considering smaller age bins than we can afford at this time.”
Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Time-dependent Convection, Energy Conservation, Automatic Differentiation, and Infrastructure (2022, background): “…will search for planetary transits across up to one million stars, characterize rocky extrasolar planets around yellow dwarf stars, subgiant stars, and red dwarf stars (Montalto et al. 2021), and investigate the seismology of stars (Miglio et al. 2017; Cunha et al. 2021; Nascimbeni et al. 2022).”
The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release (2018, background): “…NASA’s Kepler and K2 missions are providing reliable estimates of stellar surface gravities and masses (e.g. Stello et al. 2015; Sharma et al. 2016) and this is expected to continue with missions like TESS (Ricker et al. 2015; Sharma et al. 2018) and PLATO (Rauer et al. 2014; Miglio et al. 2017).”