We present a new method to obtain stellar properties for stars exhibiting
solar-like oscillations in an easy, fast, and transparent way. The method,
called Asteroseismology Made Easy (AME), can determine stellar masses,
mean-densities, radii, and surface gravities, as well as estimate ages. In this
writing we present AME as a visual and powerful tool which could be useful; in
particular in the light of the large number of exoplanets being found.
AME consists of a set of figures from which the stellar parameters are
deduced. These figures are made from a grid of stellar evolutionary models that
cover masses ranging from 0.7 Msun to 1.6 Msun in steps of 0.1 Msun and
metallicities in the interval -0.3 dex <= [Fe/H] <= +0.3 dex in increments of
0.1 dex. The stellar evolutionary models are computed using the Modules for
Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) code with simple input physics.
We have compared the results from AME with results for three groups of stars;
stars with radii determined from interferometry (and measured parallaxes),
stars with radii determined from measurements of their parallaxes (and
calculated angular diameters), and stars with results based on the modelling of
their individual oscillation frequencies. We find that a comparison of the
radii from interferometry to those from AME yield a weighted mean of the
fractional differences of just 2%. This is also the level of deviation that we
find when we compare the parallax-based radii to the radii determined from AME.
The comparison between independently determined stellar parameters and those
found using AME show that our method can provide reliable stellar masses,
radii, and ages, with median uncertainties in the order of 4%, 2%, and 25%
respectively.Comment: 18 pages, 25 figures. To be published in Astronomy & Astrophysic
