Galactic Archaeology with asteroseismology and spectroscopy: Red giants observed by CoRoT and APOGEE

TL;DR

This study uses asteroseismology and spectroscopy data from CoRoT and APOGEE to determine precise stellar parameters for 606 red giants, revealing insights into the Milky Way's chemical evolution and stellar migration patterns.

Contribution

It presents the CoRoGEE dataset with homogeneous Bayesian estimates of distances, ages, and chemical properties for red giants, and analyzes their implications for Galactic evolution models.

Findings

Agreement with chemical-evolution models in outer Galaxy regions

Evidence of stellar migration from inner to outer Galaxy

Discrepancies in high-metallicity star counts and age distributions

Abstract

With the advent of the space missions CoRoT and Kepler, it has become feasible to determine precise asteroseismic masses and ages for large samples of red-giant stars. In this paper, we present the CoRoGEE dataset -- obtained from CoRoT lightcurves for 606 red giant stars in two fields of the Galactic disc which have been co-observed for an ancillary project of APOGEE. We have used the Bayesian parameter estimation code PARAM to calculate distances, extinctions, masses, and ages for these stars in a homogeneous analysis, resulting in relative statistical uncertainties of $\sim2\%$ in distance, $\sim4\%$ in radius, $\sim9\%$ in mass and $\sim25\%$ in age. We also assess systematic age uncertainties due to different input physics and mass loss. We discuss the correlation between ages and chemical abundance patterns of field stars over a large radial range of the Milky Way's disc (5 kpc $<R_{\rm Gal}<$ 14 kpc), focussing on the [$\alpha$/Fe]-[Fe/H]-age plane in five radial bins of the Galactic disc. We find an overall agreement with the expectations of chemical-evolution models computed before the present data were available, especially for the outer regions. However, our data also indicate that a significant fraction of stars now observed near and beyond the Solar Neighbourhood migrated from inner regions. Mock CoRoGEE observations of a chemo-dynamical Milky Way disc model show that the number of high-metallicity stars in the outer disc is too high to be accounted for even by the strong radial mixing present in the model. The mock observations also reveal that the age distribution of the [$\alpha$/Fe]-enhanced sequence in the CoRoGEE inner-disc field is much broader than expected from a combination of radial mixing and observational errors. We suggest that a thick disc/bulge component that formed stars for more than 3 Gyr may account for these discrepancies.