English

A method to estimate stellar ages from kinematical data

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2018-01-31 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present a method to build a probability density function (pdf) for the age of a star based on its peculiar velocities UU, VV and WW and its orbital eccentricity. The sample used in this work comes from the Geneva-Copenhagen Survey (GCS) which contains both the spatial velocities, orbital eccentricities and isochronal ages for about 1400014\,000 stars. Using the GCS stars, we fitted the parameters that describe the relations between the distributions of kinematical properties and age. This parametrization allows us to obtain an age probability from the kinematical data. From this age pdf, we estimate an individual average age for the star using the most likely age and the expected age. We have obtained the stellar age pdf for the age of 91029\,102 stars from the GCS and have shown that the distribution of individual ages derived from our method is in good agreement with the distribution of isochronal ages. We also observe a decline in the mean metallicity with our ages for stars younger than 7 Gyr, similar to the one observed for isochronal ages. This method can be useful for the estimation of rough stellar ages for those stars that fall in areas of the HR diagram where isochrones are tightly crowded. As an example of this method, we estimate the age of Trappist-1, which is a M8V star, obtaining the age of t(UVW)=12.50(+0.296.23)t(UVW) = 12.50(+0.29-6.23) Gyr.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1801.04046,
  title  = {A method to estimate stellar ages from kinematical data},
  author = {Felipe Almeida-Fernandes and Helio Jaques Rocha-Pinto},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.04046},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

14 pages, 12 Figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T23:43:21.891Z