Talk

Combining dating methods for better stellar ages

Ruth Angus, American Museum of Natural History & Flatiron Institute

A major challenge in measuring the ages of stars is in uniting different dating methods. Different methods, such as the model-driven isochrone placement and asteroseismology and the data-driven gyrochronology and activity-age relations can often predict different ages for the same star. This is usually either because the empirical age relations are poorly calibrated in some parts of parameter space, or because the relations are stochastic: i.e. a range of rotation periods is allowed at a given age and mass. Combining age relations in a useful way requires 1) that the dating methods are self-consistently calibrated and compatible, i.e. the same methods predict the same age for the same star and 2) that they be combined in a way that allows the more informative dating method to provide the majority of age-information in its optimum parameter-space regime (e.g., isochrone placement dominates age information on the subgiant branch, gyrochronology dominates on the lower main sequence, etc). In this talk, I will present a new tool that combines gyrochronology with isochrone placement and outline the next steps towards achieving the goal of combining all available dating methods for better stellar ages.