Title: The impact of asteroseismology on stellar age dating

Place: DAA seminar room. Jeroni Muñoz research building, fourth floor, in Burjassot.

Day: Friday, October 20, 2024. Time: 12:00.

Abstract: 

The age of stars is a crucial parameter for making significant progress in numerous fields of astrophysics, from planetary science to the study of the Milky Way and similar galaxies. Despite this, it is rarely directly measurable. Estimating it requires using theoretical models of internal structure and stellar evolution. Unfortunately, the numerical descriptions available to track the evolution of stellar structure suffer from numerous limitations, particularly regarding the description of transport processes, both of angular momentum and chemical elements. These processes, however, have a decisive effect on the lifetime of stars in different evolutionary phases. Asteroseismology, a technique that uses the oscillation frequencies of stars to derive the internal distribution of matter, offers a unique opportunity to test our numerical description of stars, improve our models, and thus obtain more accurate stellar ages. The data provided by space telescopes CoRoT, Kepler, and TESS have enabled significant advances in the application of this technique to different types of stars and have laid the groundwork for future work with PLATO and, hopefully, with HAYDN. In this seminar, I will present some applications of asteroseismology to different types of main-sequence stars and will place special emphasis on the opportunities opened by the seismology of red giants for the study of the formation and evolution of the Galaxy.