Uncertainties in asteroseismic grid-based estimates of the ages of halo stars

Abstract

[...] The aim of this paper is to study the precision and theoretical biases in the age determinations of halo stars adopting both asteroseismic and classic observational constraints. [...] We adopt the well-tested SCEPtER pipeline, covering evolutionary phases up to the red giant branch (RGB). The fitting grids contain stars with mass in the range of [0.7; 1.0] $M_{\odot}$ and metallicity [Fe/H] from -2.5 to -0.5. We investigate several scenarios characterised by different adopted observational uncertainties. We also assess the impact of systematic discrepancies between the recovery grid models and target stars by computing several synthetic grids of stellar models with perturbed input physics. In our reference scenario, we recover ages for stars in the main sequence (MS) or subgiant branch (SGB) with a typical 10\%--20\% precision, while we recover those of RGB stars with a precision of about 60\%. However, adopting tighter constraints on asteroseismic parameters, the age precision in RGB improved to 20\%, while few modifications occur in the other analysed evolutionary phases. A systematic discrepancies between grid models and target stars shows that a mismatch in the mixing-length parameter value leads to significant bias in the age estimations for MS stars (about 10\%), but this bias is smaller for SGB and RGB stars. Neglecting the microscopic diffusion effect in the recovery grid leads to a typical 40\% bias in age estimates for stars on the MS. Finally, we applied the technique to stars in globular clusters. We find a precision in age estimates of around 20\% for MS stars and up to 40\% for RGB stars, greater than those obtained with classical methods. We demonstrate the method on stars of the cluster M4, obtaining a cluster age of $11.9 \pm 1.5$ Gyr and a mass at the turn-of off $0.86 \pm 0.04$ $M_{\odot}$, which are in good agreement with literature results.