The Legacy of High-precision Asteroseismology for Chemical Clock Dating and Galactic Archaeology

The formation history and evolution of the Milky Way through cosmological time is a complex field of research requiring the sampling of highly accurate and reliable stellar ages for all the components of the Galaxy. Such highly reliable ages are starting to become available due to the synergy between asteroseismology, spectroscopy, and stellar modelling in the era of all-sky astronomical surveys. Based on a sample of 227 red giants in the Galactic disc sampled from the TESS Southern Continuous Viewing Zone, with a mean relative uncertainty on the stellar age of 22% and precise chemical abundances from APOGEE DR16, we aim at finding the best possible Galactic chemical clocks. We proceed by comparing the evolution of the abundance ratios to those predicted by state-of-the-art Galactic evolution models. We identified new chemical clocks not previously considered in the literature and we investigate the non-universality of chemical clocks by taking into account the birth radius across the Galactic disc for stars in our sample. The asteroseismic yields of PLATO for red giant stars are expected to lead to a 10% precision in age dating. Such high reliability makes it the first important mission for the near future research in Galactic archaeology.PhD grant from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (PT): PD/BD/150426/201