Isochrone fitting in the Gaia era

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how incorporating Gaia parallaxes into isochrone fitting significantly improves stellar distance and age estimates, especially with Gaia's end-of-mission data, benefiting galactic studies.

Contribution

It introduces a method integrating Gaia parallaxes into isochrone fitting, quantifying improvements in stellar parameter estimates with Gaia data.

Findings

Distance uncertainties reduced by over one third with TGAS parallaxes up to 1 kpc.

Further reduction of distance uncertainties by a factor of 20 with Gaia end-of-mission data up to 10 kpc.

Age uncertainties decreased by a factor of two for over 80% of stars with Gaia parallaxes.

Abstract

Context. Currently galactic exploration is being revolutionized by a flow of new data: Gaia provides measurements of stellar distances and kinematics; growing numbers of spectroscopic surveys provide values of stellar atmospheric parameters and abundances of elements; and Kepler and K2 missions provide asteroseismic information for an increasing number of stars. Aims. In this work we aim to determine stellar distances and ages using Gaia and spectrophotometric data in a consistent way. We estimate precisions of age and distance determinations with Gaia end-of-mission and TGAS parallax precisions. Methods. To this end we incorporated parallax and extinction data into the isochrone fitting method used in the Unified tool to estimate Distances, Ages, and Masses (UniDAM). We prepared datasets that allowed us to study the improvement of distance and age estimates with the inclusion of TGAS and Gaia end-of-mission parallax precisions in isochrone fitting. Results. Using TGAS parallaxes in isochrone fitting we are able to reduce distance and age estimate uncertainties for TGAS stars for distances up to 1 kpc by more than one third, compared to results based only on spectrophotometric data. With Gaia end-of-mission parallaxes in isochrone fitting we will be able to further decrease our distance uncertainties by about a factor of 20 and age uncertainties by a factor of two for stars up to 10 kpc away from the Sun. Conclusions. We demonstrate that we will be able to improve our distance estimates for about one third of stars in spectroscopic surveys and to decrease log(age) uncertainties by about a factor of two for over 80% of stars as compared to the uncertainties obtained without parallax priors using Gaia end-of-mission parallaxes consistently with spectrophotometry in isochrone fitting .