Joint Astrophysical Colloquium
Precise asteroseismic ages from young pulsating stars
Simon Murphy (University of Southern Queensland)
Thursday 27/06/2024 @ 15:30, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
The ages of stars are notoriously difficult to determine, especially for young stars that are still shrouded in dust or surrounded by discs. Here, every Myr matters, as we try to probe the processes of planet formation and stellar composition build-up. We typically rely on ensemble ages determined for clusters or associations, but age gradients, age dispersion, and methodological uncertainties limit the available accuracy. Even the Pleiades has age uncertainties of ?30%. I will discuss recent results from asteroseismology of pre-main-sequence delta Scuti pulsators, where age precisions of ~10% (~1 Myr) can be achieved. I will describe the evolution of pulsation frequencies in young stars, how we can capture this with neural networks for faster computation and for Bayesian inference, and how this allows masses and metallicities to be determined in a degeneracy-free way, permitting stellar associations to be dated with much better precision.