Stellar acoustic radii and ages from seismic inversion techniques

Abstract

Determining stellar characteristics such as the radius, mass or age is crucial and asteroseismology is currently the most promising tool to provide these results accurately. We extend the SOLA inversion technique to new global characteristics in addition to the mean density [2] and apply our methodology to the acoustic radius and an age indicator based on the sound speed derivative. The results from SOLA inversions are compared with estimates based on the small and large frequency separations for several test cases. We show that SOLA inversions yield more accurate results than other techniques which are more sensitive to surface effects.