A Splinter Session on the Thorny Problem of Stellar Ages

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent efforts and challenges in accurately determining stellar ages, highlighting advances from asteroseismology and gyrochronology, as well as discrepancies in lithium depletion methods.

Contribution

It summarizes recent developments and issues in stellar age determination techniques discussed at a specialized workshop session.

Findings

Li depletion shows both promise and discrepancies in age-dating clusters

Uncertainties in stellar models impact age estimates

Asteroseismology and gyrochronology provide promising new age indicators

Abstract

Accurate stellar ages remain one of the most poorly constrained, but most desired, astronomical quantities. Here we briefly summarize some recent efforts to improve the stellar age scale from a subset of talks from the ``Stellar Ages'' splinter session at the "14th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars, Stellar Systems and the Sun". The topics discussed include both the apparent successes and alarming discrepancies in using Li depletion to age-date clusters, sources of uncertainty in ages due to input physics in evolutionary models, and recent results from asteroseismology and gyrochronology.