Asteroseismic determination of helium abundance in solar-type stars

In this work we investigate whether low degree modes that should be available from space and ground based asteroseismology missions can be used to determine the helium abundance, Y, in stellar envelopes with sufficient precision. We find that the oscillatory signal in the frequencies caused by the depression in Γ1 in the second helium ionisation zone can be used to determine the envelope helium abundance of low mass main sequence stars