Employing asteroseismology to investigate the history of our Galaxy

[christinahedges]

Statistical samples of stellar ages and compositions of red giants offer the opportunity to study the structure and evolution of the Galaxy, i.e. they enable Galactic Archaeology (Miglio et al. 2013). Recent asteroseismic analyses of red giants observed by Kepler have revealed a strong relationship between the ages of the stars from Kepler and their chemical composition as inferred from APOGEE spectra (Silva Aguirre et al. 2018). The result was based on original Kepler field alone. It is likely that similar analyses across the 20 fields observed by K2 will reveal new insights into the history of the Milky Way. To date only early data from K2 have been analyzed in this way (Stello et al. 2017). Future studies will be aided greatly by the availability of HERMES spectra (Wittenmyer et al. 2018), the new Gaia DR2 parallaxes (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018), and the introduction of machine learning to enhance the data processing (Hon et al. 2018).