A Splinter Session on the Thorny Problem of Stellar Ages

摘要

Accurate stellar ages remain one of the most poorly constrained,but most desired, astronomical quantities. Here we briefly summarize some recent efforts to improve the stellar age scale from a subset of talks from the "Stellar Ages" splinter session at the 14th Cambridge Workshop on Cool Stars,Stellar Systems, and the Sun. The topics discussed include both the apparent successes and alarming discrepancies in using Li depletion to age-date clusters,sources of uncertainty in ages due to input physics in evolutionary models, and recent results from asteroseismology and gyrochronology.