Paper detail

Asteroseismic modeling of 16 Cyg A & B using the complete Kepler data set

Asteroseismology of bright stars with well-determined properties from parallax measurements and interferometry can yield precise stellar ages and meaningful constraints on the composition. We substantiate this claim with an updated asteroseismic analysis of the solar-analog binary system 16 Cyg A & B using the complete 30-month data sets from the Kepler space telescope. An analysis with the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal (AMP), using all of the available constraints to model each star independently, yields the same age ($t=7.0 \pm 0.3$ Gyr) and composition ($Z=0.021 \pm 0.002$, $Y_i=0.25 \pm 0.01$) for both stars, as expected for a binary system. We quantify the accuracy of the derived stellar properties by conducting a similar analysis of a Kepler-like data set for the Sun, and we investigate how the reliability of asteroseismic inference changes when fewer observational constraints are available or when different fitting methods are employed. We find that our estimates of the initial helium mass fraction are probably biased low by 0.02-0.03 from neglecting diffusion and settling of heavy elements, and we identify changes to our fitting method as the likely source of small shifts from our initial results in 2012. We conclude that in the best cases reliable stellar properties can be determined from asteroseismic analysis even without independent constraints on the radius and luminosity.