GASTAG evolutionary tracks and isochrones from coupled 1D and 3D models: Systematic temperature offsets in red giants

Abstract

Models of stellar structure and evolution describe the global and internal properties of stars throughout their lifetimes and are indispensable for studies of stellar clusters and Galactic evolution. However, most 1D evolutionary calculations rely on simplified treatment of convection, resulting in inaccurate near-surface structures and non-negligible uncertainties in the predicted fundamental parameters of low-mass stars. In a series of previous works, a novel approach was developed to couple 1D stellar interior models with 3D model atmospheres throughout the evolutionary calculation. This 1D-3D coupling method makes predicted stellar properties effectively independent of the mixing-length parameter. To expand this framework to ensemble studies of stars and age determinations of clusters, we present the GASTAG stellar evolutionary tracks and isochrones constructed using the 1D-3D coupling approach. Comparing effective temperatures from the APOGEE-Kepler catalog with GASTAG predictions, we find the theoretical temperatures are cooler by about 70 K near solar metallicity. Our isochrones are compared with observed color-magnitude diagrams of star clusters spanning from $\rm [Fe/H] = 0.3$ to $-1.9$. In all cases, the synthesized and observed diagrams agree excellently in the main-sequence, turn-off, and subgiant regions, while isochrones predict systematically cooler red giant branches. Taking these independent findings together reveals that the temperature mismatch is most likely due to deficiencies in stellar models. Because GASTAG is constructed using a method that substantially reduces uncertainties associated with surface boundary conditions and the mixing-length parameter, the difference between modeling and observation can be more confidently attributed to other ingredients in the models, such as $\alpha$-element abundances or uncertainties in low-temperature opacities.