Timing the formation of the Galactic thin disc with asteroseismic stellar ages

TL;DR

This study uses asteroseismic data to determine precise ages of over 5000 red giant stars, revealing the formation epoch of the Galactic thin disc around 9.5 billion years ago and its simultaneous formation with the thick disc.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale asteroseismic age estimates for thin disc stars, highlighting the impact of temperature scale choices on age accuracy and offering new insights into the Galaxy's formation timeline.

Findings

The oldest thin disc stars are approximately 9.5 Gyr old.

Thin and thick discs began forming stars simultaneously.

First thin disc stars show a broad range of Galactocentric radii.

Abstract

The formation of the extended thin disc is the most spectacular event of our Galaxy in the past $\sim8$\,Gyr. To unveil this process, obtaining precise and accurate stellar ages for a large sample of stars is essential although challenging. In this work, we present the asteroseismic age determination of 5306 red giant branch stars using \kepler{} and LAMOST data, with a thorough examination of how the age determination is affected by the choice of different temperature scales and stellar models. Thanks to the high precision of the asteroseismic and spectroscopic parameters of our sample stars, we are able to achieve age determination with an average accuracy of 12 per cent. However, the age determination is sensitively dependent on the adopted temperature scale, as 50\,K difference in effective temperature may cause larger than 10 per cent systematic uncertainty in the age estimates. Using the ages derived with the most plausible set of the temperature scale, we study the age distribution of the chemical thin disc stars, and present an estimate of the formation epoch of the first Galactic thin disc stars. We find that the first (oldest) thin disc stars have an age of $9.5^{+0.5(\rm rand.)+0.5(\rm sys.)}_{-0.4(\rm rand.)-0.3(\rm sys.)}$\,Gyr, where the systematic uncertainties reflect ages estimated using different stellar evolutionary models. At this epoch, the Galactic thick disc was still forming stars, indicating there is a time window when both the thin and thick discs of our Galaxy were forming stars together. Moreover, we find that the first thin disc stars exhibit a broad distribution of Galactocentric radii, suggesting that the inner and outer thin discs began to form simultaneously.