The internal properties of stars in the red-giant phase undergo significant
changes on relatively short timescales. Long near-uninterrupted high-precision
photometric timeseries observations from dedicated space missions such as CoRoT
and Kepler have provided seismic inferences of the global and internal
properties of a large number of evolved stars, including red giants. These
inferences are confronted with predictions from theoretical models to improve
our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Our knowledge and
understanding of red giants have indeed increased tremendously using these
seismic inferences, and we anticipate that more information is still hidden in
the data. Unraveling this will further improve our understanding of stellar
evolution. This will also have significant impact on our knowledge of the Milky
Way Galaxy as well as on exo-planet host stars. The latter is important for our
understanding of the formation and structure of planetary systems.Comment: Invited review for The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review, accepted
for publicatio
