Asteroseismology of red-clump stars with CoRoT and Kepler

The availability of asteroseismic constraints for a large number of red giants with CoRoT and, in the near future with Kepler, paves the way for detailed studies of populations of galactic‐disk red giants. We investigate which information on the observed population can be recovered by the distribution of the observed seismic constraints: the frequency of maximum power of solar‐like oscillations (νmax) and the large frequency separation (Δν). We use the distribution of νmax and of Δν observed by CoRoT in nearly 800 red giants in the first long observational run, as a tool to investigate the properties of galactic red‐giant stars through the comparison with simulated distributions based on synthetic stellar populations. We can clearly identify the bulk of the red giants observed by CoRoT as red‐clump stars, i.e. post‐flash core‐He‐burning stars. The distribution of νmax and of Δν give us access to the distribution of the stellar radius and mass, and thus represent a most promising probe of the age and star ...