Speaker
Description
In the study of galactic archeology, the lack of reliable stellar ages often impairs the capability to accurately explain the evolution of our galaxy. To date, NASA's Kepler mission has been considered the gold standard for the most precise asteroseismic ages, despite data only being available for a small portion of the sky. With TESS’s all-sky photometry now available, we can expand the calibration sample if we can prove that TESS has a similar accuracy and precision to Kepler. To do so, we have compared TESS to APOGEE DR17, which was calibrated to Kepler, and discovered that the asteroseismic and spectroscopic surface gravities agree to better than 5% for 90% of stars. However, we find that the errors were underestimated by a factor of ~2. With this information, we use asteroseismic scaling relations to infer masses and surface gravities for ~15,000 red giants. We conclude that current TESS seismic results can already be used for galactic archaeology, and future results with Milky Way Mapper will likely be highly transformational to our understanding.
