Red Giants as Probes of the Structure and Evolution of the Milky Way
Exciting results are blooming, thanks to a convergence between unprecedented asteroseismic data obtained by the satellites CoRoT and KEPLER, and state-of-the-art models of the internal structure of red giants and of galactic evolution. The pulsation prope
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Red Giants as Probes of the Structure and Evolution of the Milky Way Editors Andrea Miglio Josefina Montalb´an Arlette Noels
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Editors Andrea Miglio Universit´e de Li`ege Inst. d’Astrophysique et de G´eophysique Li´ege, Belgium and School of Physics and Astronomy University of Birmingham Birmingham, UK
Josefina Montalb´an Arlette Noels Universit´e de Li`ege Inst. d’Astrophysique et de G´eophysique Li´ege, Belgium
ISSN 1570-6591 e-ISSN 1570-6605 ISBN 978-3-642-18417-8 e-ISBN 978-3-642-18418-5 DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-18418-5 Springer Heidelberg Dordrecht London New York Library of Congress Control Number: 2012930406 c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilm or in any other way, and storage in data banks. Duplication of this publication or parts thereof is permitted only under the provisions of the German Copyright Law of September 9, 1965, in its current version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Violations are liable to prosecution under the German Copyright Law. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
Preface
Red giants are cool, highly luminous stars, covering a rather wide domain in mass, age, chemical composition, and evolutionary state. They have an extended convective envelope which can, as in solar-like stars, stochastically excite p-modes of oscillation. During its first long run (150 days) of observation, the CoRoT satellite launched in December 2006 has observed a large number of red giants and has detected these oscillations in about 900 of them. Not only radial but also nonradial modes of oscillation were detected. It was indeed the first clear detection of nonradial modes in such stars. Moreover, for the very first time, the large number of observed stars (it amounts now to thousands and many more to come) allows the statistical analysis of red giants based on their pulsation properties. • The first striking result of this statistical analysis has shown that the distribution of frequency at maximum power (max ) among all the observed red giants presents a rather narrow peak centered on about 35 Hz. This has to bear the print of the evolution of our Galaxy since these red giants of different masses and ages are representative of all the successive generations of stars in the Galaxy. A first theoretical study made using synthetic stellar population models shows that the actual distribution of red giants in the CoRoT field is indeed highly dominate
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