Institute of Astronomy

Calibrating Gyrochronology Using Kepler Asteroseismic targets

SpeakerTalk DateTalk Series
Ruth Angus28 July 2014Across HR 2014 Talks

Abstract

Measuring ages for intermediate and low mass stars on the main sequence is challenging, but important for a wide range of studies, from Galactic dynamics to stellar and planetary evolution. The most commonly used dating methods are extremely model dependent and often provide age estimates with uncertainties of order 100% or more. Among the available methods, gyrochronology is a powerful one, because it requires knowledge of only the star’s mass (or suitable proxy) and rotation period. However, it is not well calibrated at late ages. The continuous, high precision light curves obtained by Kepler mission are ideally suited to measuring photometric rotation periods and, for a few hundred bright Kepler targets, asteroseismology also provides relatively precise ages. We measured surface rotation periods for 144 Kepler targets with asteroseismic age estimates, which should in principle enable us to test the uniqueness and improve the calibration of the gyrochronology relation at late ages.

Presentation