Asteroseismically Inferred Ages of 132,000 Red Giants with TESS

TL;DR

This paper uses TESS data and custom stellar models to estimate ages for over 132,000 red giants, providing a large, reliable dataset to advance galactic archaeology.

Contribution

It introduces a new method combining TESS observations with MESA models to estimate red giant ages with 23% uncertainty, significantly expanding available data.

Findings

Ages follow similar distributions to Kepler samples

Reliable age estimates for 132,794 red giants

Provides data for galactic archaeology studies

Abstract

NASA's TESS mission has identified at least 158,000 oscillating red giants, increasing the known sample by roughly an order of magnitude. After validating that these measurements are reliable to 5% for up to 90% of red giants (Theodoridis & Tayar 2023), we make custom stellar evolution models using MESA in order to estimate ages for ~132,794 of these stars to an average uncertainty of 23%. We show that these ages follow similar distributions to those observed in other samples such as Kepler with small differences likely resulting in the galactic volume probed. We provide these ages to the community to enable future galactic archaeology analyses.