Modelling of Red Giant Stars: The state-of-the-art

Abstract

The seismic data obtained by the CoRoT and Kepler space missions have provided inferences of the global and structural properties of thousands of red giants. When compared with stellar model predictions, these inferences can significantly improve our understanding of stellar evolution. We present a brief review of the structure and evolution of red giant stars, devoting some emphasis on the major, still open problems.