Speaker
Diane Feuillet
(MPIA)
Description
While detailed chemical abundances of stars are a very powerful tool for examining the evolutionary history of a galaxy, both simulations and observations are finding that abundances alone are not enough to break degeneracies in the proposed formation scenarios. To break these degeneracies, it is crucial that we also provide ages. By observing red giant stars in the near-IR, APOGEE has obtained the largest spatial spectroscopic coverage of disk stars to date. However, aside from time-consuming asteroseismic methods, ages are very difficult to determine for red giants. We have developed a hierarchical modeling method of determining statistical age trends for APOGEE giants with known distances. This method constrains the mean age and age dispersion of stars in a single abundance bin using the products of Bayesian isochrone matching. In this way, the full non-Gaussian age PDFs of the individual stars are used to determine the most probable properties of the mono-abundance sub-sample.
Primary author
Diane Feuillet
(MPIA)
