Giant star seismology

TL;DR

This paper discusses how space-based asteroseismology from missions like CoRoT and Kepler has advanced our understanding of red giant stars' internal structures, with implications for stellar evolution, galactic studies, and exoplanet research.

Contribution

It reviews recent seismic inferences of red giants and highlights the potential for further discoveries in stellar and galactic evolution through data analysis.

Findings

Seismic data has significantly improved models of red giant internal structure.

Current data reveals complex internal processes in evolved stars.

Future analysis promises deeper insights into stellar evolution and galaxy formation.

Abstract

The internal properties of stars in the red-giant phase undergo significant changes on relatively short timescales. Long near-uninterrupted high-precision photometric timeseries observations from dedicated space missions such as CoRoT and Kepler have provided seismic inferences of the global and internal properties of a large number of evolved stars, including red giants. These inferences are confronted with predictions from theoretical models to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Our knowledge and understanding of red giants have indeed increased tremendously using these seismic inferences, and we anticipate that more information is still hidden in the data. Unraveling this will further improve our understanding of stellar evolution. This will also have significant impact on our knowledge of the Milky Way Galaxy as well as on exo-planet host stars. The latter is important for our understanding of the formation and structure of planetary systems.