The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (NASA-TESS) mission presents a treasure trove for understanding the stars it observes and the Milky Way, in which they reside. We present a first look at the prospects for Galactic and stellar astrophysics by performing initial asteroseismic analyses of bright (G < 11) red giant stars in the TESS southern continuous viewing zone (SCVZ). Using three independent pipelines, we detect νmax and Δν in 41 per cent of the 15 405 star parent sample (6388 stars), with consistency at a level of $\sim \! 2{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ in νmax and $\sim \! 5{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ in Δν. Based on this, we predict that seismology will be attainable for ∼3 × 105 giants across the whole sky and at least 104 giants with ≥1 yr of observations in the TESS-CVZs, subject to improvements in analysis and data reduction techniques. The best quality TESS-CVZ data, for 5574 stars where pipelines returned consistent results, provide high-quality power spectra across a number of stellar evolutionary states. This makes possible studies of, for example, the asymptotic giant branch bump. Furthermore, we demonstrate that mixed ℓ = 1 modes and rotational splitting are cleanly observed in the 1-yr data set. By combining TESS-CVZ data with TESS-HERMES, SkyMapper, APOGEE, and Gaia, we demonstrate its strong potential for Galactic archaeology studies, providing good age precision and accuracy that reproduces well the age of high [α/Fe] stars and relationships between mass and kinematics from previous studies based on e.g. Kepler. Better quality astrometry and simpler target selection than the Kepler sample makes this data ideal for studies of the local star formation history and evolution of the Galactic disc. These results provide a strong case for detailed spectroscopic follow-up in the CVZs to complement that which has been (or will be) collected by current surveys.

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The prospects of using abundance ratios as stellar age indicators appear promising for solar analogues, but the usefulness of this technique for stars spanning a much wider parameter space remains to be established. We present abundances of 21 elements in a sample of 13 bright FG dwarfs drawn from the Kepler LEGACY sample to examine the applicability of the abundance-age relations to stars with properties strongly departing from solar. These stars have precise asteroseismic ages that can be compared to the abundance-based estimates. We analyse the well-known binary 16 Cyg AB for validation purposes and confirm the existence of a slight metal enhancement (∼0.02 dex) in the primary, which might arise from planetary formation and/or ingestion. We draw attention to systematic errors in some widely used catalogues of non-seismic parameters that may significantly bias asteroseismic inferences. In particular, we find evidence that the ASPCAP Teff scale used for the APOKASC catalogue is too cool for dwarfs and that the [Fe/H] values are underestimated by ∼0.1 dex. In addition, a new seismic analysis of the early F-type star KIC 9965715 relying on our spectroscopic constraints shows that the star is more massive and younger than previously thought. We compare seismic ages to those inferred from empirical abundance-age relations based on ages from PARSEC isochrones and abundances obtained in the framework of the HARPS-GTO programme. These calibrations depend on the stellar effective temperature, metallicity, and/or mass. We find that the seismic and abundance-based ages differ on average by 1.5–2 Gyr, while taking into account a dependency on one or two stellar parameters in the calibrations leads to a global improvement of up to ∼0.5 Gyr. However, even in that case we find that seismic ages are systematically larger by ∼0.7 Gyr. We argue that it may be ascribed to a variety of causes including the presence of small zero-point offsets between our abundances and those used to construct the calibrations or to the choice of the set of theoretical isochrones. The conclusions above are supported by the analysis of literature data for a larger number of Kepler targets. For this extended sample, we find that incorporating a Teff dependency largely corrects for the fact that the abundance-based ages are lower/larger with respect to the seismic estimates for the cooler/hotter stars. Although investigating age dating methods relying on abundance data is worth pursuing, we conclude that further work is needed to improve both their precision and accuracy for stars that are not solar analogues.

The accuracy of theoretical mass, radius and effective temperature values for M-dwarf stars is an active topic of debate. Differences between observed and theoretical values have raised the possibility that current theoretical stellar structure and evolution models are inaccurate towards the low-mass end of the main sequence. To explore this issue we use the CHEOPS satellite to obtain high-precision light curves of eclipsing binaries with low mass stellar companions. We use these light curves combined with the spectroscopic orbit for the solar-type companion to measure the mass, radius and effective temperature of the M-dwarf star. Here we present the analysis of three eclipsing binaries. We use the pycheops data analysis software to fit the observed transit and eclipse events of each system. Two of our systems were also observed by the TESS satellite– we similarly analyse these light curves for comparison. We find consistent results between CHEOPS and TESS, presenting three stellar radii and two stellar effective temperature values of low-mass stellar objects. These initial results from our on-going observing programme with CHEOPS show that we can expect to have ∼24 new mass, radius and effective temperature measurements for very low mass stars within the next few years.