Fundamental stellar parameters and age-metallicity relation of Kepler red giants in comparison with theoretical evolutionary tracks

TL;DR

This study combines spectroscopic and asteroseismic data to validate stellar evolutionary models for Kepler red giants, deriving their ages and analyzing the age-metallicity relation, confirming model reliability and revealing metallicity trends over time.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison between observed stellar parameters and theoretical evolutionary tracks for Kepler red giants, validating the models and deriving the age-metallicity relation.

Findings

Approximately 90% agreement between observations and models.

Metallicity dispersion increases with stellar age.

Presence of super-solar metallicity stars across a wide age range.

Abstract

Spectroscopic parameters (effective temperature, metallicity, etc) were determined for a large sample of ~100 red giants in the Kepler field, for which mass, radius, and evolutionary status had already been asteroseismologically established. These two kinds of spectroscopic and seismic information suffice to define the position on the "luminosity versus effective temperature" diagram and to assign an appropriate theoretical evolutionary track to each star. Making use of this advantage, we examined whether the stellar location on this diagram really matches the assigned track, which would make an interesting consistency check between theory and observation. It turned out that satisfactory agreement was confirmed in most cases (~90%, though appreciable discrepancies were seen for some stars such as higher-mass red-clump giants), suggesting that recent stellar evolution calculations are practically reliable. Since the relevant stellar age could also be obtained by this comparison, we derived the age-metallicity relation for these Kepler giants and found the following characteristics: (1) The resulting distribution is quite similar to what was previously concluded for FGK dwarfs. (2) The dispersion of metallicity progressively increases as the age becomes older. (3) Nevertheless, the maximum metallicity at any stellar age remains almost flat, which means the existence of super/near-solar metallicity stars in a considerably wide age range from ~(2--3)x 10^8~yr to ~10^10~yr.