Clusters: age scales for stellar physics

TL;DR

This paper reviews various stellar age-dating techniques, discusses their strengths and weaknesses, and proposes a step-by-step method to construct a coherent age scale for stellar clusters, improving accuracy in stellar evolution studies.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic approach to build a reliable stellar age scale ladder, integrating multiple techniques to reduce uncertainties.

Findings

Comparison of age-dating methods highlights their advantages and limitations.

A step-by-step process for constructing a coherent age scale is proposed.

The approach minimizes error sources in stellar age estimation.

Abstract

Ages are key to truly understand a large plethora of astrophysical phenomena. On the other hand, stellar clusters are open windows to understand stellar evolution, specifically, the change with time and mass of different stellar properties. As such, they are our laboratories where different theories can be tested, but without accurate ages, our knowledge would impaired. We revisit here a large number of age-dating techniques and discuss their advantages and draw-backs. In addition, a step-by step process is suggested in order to built a coherent age scale ladder, minimizing the error budget and the sources of uncertainty.