Theoretical investigation on the mass loss impact on asteroseismic grid-based estimates of mass, radius, and age for RGB stars

We aim to perform a theoretical evaluation of the impact of the mass loss indetermination on asteroseismic grid based estimates of masses, radii, and ages of stars in the red giant branch phase (RGB). We adopted the SCEPtER pipeline on a grid spanning the mass range [0.8; 1.8] Msun. As observational constraints, we adopted the star effective temperatures, the metallicity [Fe/H], the average large frequency spacing $Delta u,$ and the frequency of maximum oscillation power $ u_{ m max}$. The mass loss was modelled following a Reimers parametrization with the two different efficiencies $eta = 0.4$ and $eta = 0.8$. In the RGB phase, the average error owing only to observational uncertainty on mass and age estimates is about 8% and 30% respectively. The bias in mass and age estimates caused by the adoption of a wrong mass loss parameter in the recovery is minor for the vast majority of the RGB evolution. The biases get larger only after the RGB bump. In the last 2.5% of the RGB lifetime the error on the mass determination reaches 6.5% becoming larger than the random error component in this evolutionary phase. The error on the age estimate amounts to 9%, that is, equal to the random error uncertainty. These results are independent of the stellar metallicity [Fe/H] in the explored range. Asteroseismic-based estimates of stellar mass, radius, and age in the RGB phase can be considered mass loss independent within the range ($eta in [0.0, 0.8]$) as long as the target is in an evolutionary phase preceding the RGB bump.