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±0.3 Gyr) and composition (Z=0.021±0.002, Yi​=0.25±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.Comment: 5 emulateapj pages, 1 table, 1 figure. ApJ Letters, accepte