Red giant stars: Probing the milky way chemical enrichment

Abstract

Many ongoing (SDSS-SEGUE, SDSS-APOGEE, RAVE) and future (HERMES, 4MOST) surveys have the main goal to map the complex kinematical and chemical substructures of the Milky Way, with the final aim to constrain its assembly history. The combination of asteroseismic information from Keplerand CoRoT satellites for giant stars, for which abundance and kinematical information are provided by ground-based spectroscopic surveys opens a new and powerful way to study our Galaxy. Indeed the asteroseismology plus abundance information can be potentially translated into stellar ages for large samples of stars. Here, I give a brief overview of what are the main open questions in the field of Galactic Archaeology—from the study of the First Stars to enrich the Universe, to the Galaxy assembly history—and how could CoRoT and Kepler make a definitive contribution to those questions.