Age determination of the HR8799 planetary system using asteroseismology

Discovery of the first planetary system by direct imaging around HR8799 has made the age determination of the host star a very important task. This determination is the key to derive accurate masses of the planets and to study the dynamical stability of the system. The age of this star has been estimated using different procedures. In this work we show that some of these procedures have problems and large uncertainties, and the real age of this star is still unknown, needing more observational constraints. Therefore, we have developed a comprehensive modeling of HR8799, and taking advantage of its gamma Doradus-type pulsations, we have estimated the age of the star using asteroseismology. The accuracy in the age determination depends on the rotation velocity of the star, and therefore an accurate value of the inclination angle is required to solve the problem. Nevertheless, we find that the age estimate for this star previously published in the literature ([30,160] Myr) is unlikely, and a more accurate value might be closer to the Gyr. This determination has deep implications on the value of the mass of the objects orbiting HR8799. An age around $\approx$ 1 Gyr implies that these objects are brown dwarfs.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted in MNRAS Letter

Generic ordering of structural transitions in quasi-one-dimensional Wigner crystals

We investigate the dependence of the structural phase transitions in an infinite quasi-one-dimensional system of repulsively interacting particles on the profile of the confining channel. Three different functional expressions for the confinement potential related to real experimental systems are used that can be tuned continuously from a parabolic to a hard-wall potential in order to find a thorough understanding of the ordering of the chain-like structure transitions. We resolve the longstanding issue why the most theories predicted a 1-2-4-3-4 sequence of chain configurations with increasing density, while some experiments found the 1-2-3-4 sequence.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure