Galactic archaeology: mapping and dating stellar populations with asteroseismology of red-giant stars

By A. Miglio, C. Chiappini, T. Morel, M. Barbieri, W. Chaplin, L. Girardi, J. Montalbán, M. Valentini, B. Mosser, F. Baudin and 4 more. 2012

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Our understanding of how the Galaxy was formed and evolves is severely hampered by the lack of precise constraints on basic stellar properties such as distances, masses, and ages. Here, we show that solar-like pulsating red giants represent a well-populated class of accurate distance indicators, spanning a large age range, which can be used to map and date the Galactic disc in the regions probed by observations made by the CoRoT† and Kepler space telescopes. When combined with photometric constraints, the pulsation spectra of such evolved stars not only reveal their radii, and hence distances, but also provide well-constrained estimates of their masses, which are reliable proxies for the ages of the stars. As a first application we consider red giants observed by CoRoT in two different parts of the Milky Way, and determine precise distances for �2000 stars spread across nearly 15,000 pc of the Galactic disc, exploring regions which are a long way from the solar neighbourhood. We find significant differences in the mass distributions of these two samples which, by comparison with predictions of synthetic models of the Milky Way, we interpret as mainly due to the vertical gradient in the distribution of stellar masses (hence ages) in the disc. In the future, the availability of spectroscopic constraints for this sample of stars will not only improve the age determination, but also provide crucial constraints on age-velocity and age-metallicity relations at different Galactocentric radii and heights from the plane.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computational Mechanics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/427b8017c57f1d20bebd3bafb8b235405b1a7ca2

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Citations in the corpus

The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, background): “…potential in combining asteroseismic information with stellar surface temperature and composition data from photometry and spectroscopy (e.g., Miglio et al. 2013; Casagrande et al. 2016), bringing a new level of precision to determinations of stellar age, mass, radius and surface gravity for…”
The Masses and Spins of Neutron Stars and Stellar-Mass Black Holes (2014, methodology): “Other techniques are sometimes applied; for example, asteroseismology has been used to find the masses of some white dwarfs, main sequence stars, and giants [85, 86, 87, 88].”
Chemodynamics of the Milky Way - I. The first year of APOGEE data (2013, methodology): “The combination of these datasets with complementary information coming from asteroseismology (Miglio et al. 2013a) data will be an important asset.”
THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, methodology): “…spectroscopic Teff , stellar radii determined using asteroseismic scaling relations, and bolometric corrections (e.g., Marigo et al. 2008) (see T. Rodrigues et al. 2014, in preparation, for full details); these distances have random and systematic uncertainties of 5% each (Miglio et al. 2013).”
FUNDAMENTAL PROPERTIES OF KEPLER PLANET-CANDIDATE HOST STARS USING ASTEROSEISMOLOGY (2013, unknown): “To derive masses and radii we have employed several different methods (da Silva et al. 2006; Stello et al. 2009; Basu et al. 2011; Miglio et al. 2013b; Silva Aguirre et al. 2013).”
Red giant masses and ages derived from carbon and nitrogen abundances (2015, unknown): “Further models by Miglio et al. (2013b) also suggest a different offset in the (cid:4)ν scaling relation for RC and RGB stars (in the sense that RC masses are underestimated and RGB masses are overestimated by the standard relation).”
Ages and fundamental properties of Kepler exoplanet host stars from asteroseismology (2015, background): “…(e.g., Mosser et al. 2010; Huber et al. 2014), studies of open clusters (e.g., Basu et al. 2011; Stello et al. 2011), galactic archaeology (e.g., Miglio et al. 2013b; Casagrande et al. 2014), and will form the basis of asteroseismic analysis for the vast majority of targets observed by the…”
Standing on the Shoulders of Dwarfs: the Kepler Asteroseismic LEGACY Sample. II. Radii, Masses, and Ages (2016, background): “These properties, ages in particular, are crucial to our understanding of different fields of astrophysics (such as Galactic Archaeology, see e.g., Miglio et al. 2013; Casagrande et al. 2016).”
Confirming chemical clocks: asteroseismic age dissection of the Milky Way disc(s) (2017, methodology): “…and the advent of asteroseismology as a tool for Galactic archaeology promises to test this paradigm by determining precise masses and ages for thousands of stars in distant regions of the Milky Way (e.g. Miglio et al. 2013b; Casagrande et al. 2014, 2016; Anders et al. 2017; Rodrigues et al. 2017).”
THE K2 ECLIPTIC PLANE INPUT CATALOG (EPIC) AND STELLAR CLASSIFICATIONS OF 138,600 TARGETS IN CAMPAIGNS 1–8 (2015, background): “…includes a larger relative fraction of red giants compared to dwarfs, a consequence of the K2 galactic archeology program to map the age and metallicity distributions of stars using asteroseismology (e.g., Miglio et al. 2013; Casagrande et al. 2014; Pinsonneault et al. 2014; Stello et al. 2015).”
Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, background): “We also remark that the accuracy of asteroseismic masses (and thus ages) obtained from scaling relations is still largely unexplored, especially in giants (see e.g. Miglio et al. 2013a).”
PLATO as it is: a legacy mission for Galactic archaeology (2017, unknown): “Seismic constraints can be combined with effective temperature and apparent photometric magnitudes to determine distances (see Figure 8 and Anders et al. 2017b; Mathur et al. 2016; Miglio et al. 2013; Rodrigues et al. 2014).”
THE APOKASC CATALOG: AN ASTEROSEISMIC AND SPECTROSCOPIC JOINT SURVEY OF TARGETS IN THE KEPLER FIELDS (2014, methodology): “In the CoRoT fields Miglio et al. (2013) were able to infer mean stellar mass differences between populations along different sightlines, but interpreting these measurements in terms of age would require spectroscopic data on metallicity and the mixture of heavy elements.”