Schedule Oct 26, 2011
Testing Stellar Physics with Kepler: Evolutionary Tracks, Convective Cores, and Detailed Models
Victor Silva Aguirre (MPA Garching)

The Kepler mission has offered us the opportunity to measure seismic properties in hundreds of solar-type stars to an exquisite level of precision. This information, coupled with effective temperature determinations, allows us to extract the mass and radius of field stars in a model independent way. When individual frequencies are obtained, suitable combinations of them are sensitive to the deepest layers of stars, making them ideal probes for the study of conditions at the centres of stars. In this talk we show the capabilities of Kepler data to construct, for the first time, evolutionary sequences from field stars in a completely model independent way. Using these results, combined with state-of-the-art evolutionary codes and stellar parameters, we set constraints on the existence, size, and evolutionary stage of convective cores in solar-type targets.


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