spin tagging of stars?

At the Stars group meeting, John Brewer (Yale) and Matteo Cantiello (Flatiron) told us about the Kepler / K2 Science meeting, which happened last week. Brewer was particularly interested in the predictions that Ruth Murray-Clay made for chemical abundance differences between big and small planet hosts; it is too early to tell how well these match on to the results Brewer is finding for chemical differences between stars hosting different kinds of exoplanet architectures.

Other highlights included really cool supernova light curves, with amazing details, Granulation or flicker estimates of delta-nu and nu-max, and a clear bimodality in planetary radii between super-earths and mini-neptunes. There was much discussion in group meeting of this latter result, both what it might mean, and what predictions it might generate.

Highlights for Cantiello included results on the inflation of short-period planets by heating by their host stars. And, intriguingly, a possible asteroseismic measurement of stellar inclinations. That is, you might be able to tell the projection of a star's spin angular momentum vector projected onto the line of sight. If you could (and if some results about aligned spin vectors in star-forming regions hold up) this could lead to a new kind of tagging for stars that are co-eval!