Today Trevor David (Flatiron) showed me some amazingly precise and detailed dependences of abundance ratios on stellar age. The idea is: Different stars formed in different moments in the chemical-enrichment history of the Milky Way, and so the abundance ratios give the stellar ages in detail. The abundances he has are from Brewer and Fischer, and the ages he has are from various sources, including especially isochrone ages. We discussed the following problem:
Given that you don't believe any age estimates in detail, and given that any abundance measurements and age estimates are noisy and biased, what is the best way to build usable abundance–age relationships that can be used as alternative clocks (alternative to isochrones, stellar rotation, asteroseismology, and C–N dredge-up, for examples)? We settled on a few ideas, most of which involve building a low-dimensional hypersurface in the space of abundances and age, and then fitting for adjustments or corrections to different age systems.
No comments:
Post a Comment