Long-Period Variables as distance and age indicators in the era of Gaia and LSST

TL;DR

This paper discusses the potential of long-period variables as distance and age indicators, emphasizing the importance of theoretical pulsation models and exploring semi-regular variables as complementary tools in large-scale surveys like Gaia and LSST.

Contribution

It presents ongoing modeling efforts of stellar pulsation in evolved stars and evaluates semi-regular variables as new distance indicators.

Findings

Pulsation physics models enhance understanding of long-period variables.

Semi-regular variables show promise as complementary distance indicators.

The work supports improved use of variability data from Gaia and LSST.

Abstract

Long-period variables are bright, evolved red giant stars showing periodic photometric changes due to stellar pulsation. They follow one or more period-luminosity and period-age relations, which make them highly promising distance indicators and tracers of young and intermediate-age stellar populations. Such a potential is especially interesting in view of the massive amount of data delivered by modern large-scale variability surveys. Crucially, these applications require a clear theoretical understanding of pulsation physics in connection with stellar evolution. Here, I describe an ongoing effort from our collaboration dedicated to the modelling of stellar pulsation in evolved stars, and how this work is impacting our capability of investigating long-period variables and exploiting them for other astrophysical studies. Furthermore, I present our ongoing work aimed at assessing the potential of semi-regular variables, an often neglected sub-type of long-period variables, to be distance indicators complementary to their better-known, more evolved counterparts, the Mira variables.