Asteroseismology of bright stars with well-determined properties from parallax measurements and interferometry can yield precise stellar ages and meaningful constraints on the composition .
We substantiate this claim with an updated asteroseismic analysis of the solar-analog binary system 16 Cyg A & B using the complete 30-month data sets from the Kepler space telescope .
An analysis with the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal ( AMP ) , using all of the available constraints to model each star independently , yields the same age ( t = 7.0 \pm 0.3 Gyr ) and composition ( Z = 0.021 \pm 0.002 , Y _ { i } = 0.25 \pm 0.01 ) for both stars , as expected for a binary system .
We quantify the accuracy of the derived stellar properties by conducting a similar analysis of a Kepler-like data set for the Sun , and we investigate how the reliability of asteroseismic inference changes when fewer observational constraints are available or when different fitting methods are employed .
We find that our estimates of the initial helium mass fraction are probably biased low by 0.02–0.03 from neglecting diffusion and settling of heavy elements , and we identify changes to our fitting method as the likely source of small shifts from our initial results in 2012 .
We conclude that in the best cases reliable stellar properties can be determined from asteroseismic analysis even without independent constraints on the radius and luminosity .