The HAges Catalog: Stellar Ages For High Priority HWO Target Stars

Precise stellar ages (uncertainties ≲1 Gyr, or ∼20% at solar age) are required to discern evolutionary trends in atmospheric biosignatures of terrestrial habitable zone exoplanets surveyed by the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) and will aid in constraining planetary interior evolution and target prioritization.

We present a catalog of stellar ages for Tier 1 and Tier 2 targets in the HWO Target Stars and Systems (TSS) sub-working group’s TSS25 list, compiling published literature ages derived from high-precision methods. The sample comprises 659 stars likely to be observed by HWO, independent of the final mission architecture.

This initial catalog focuses on asteroseismology and gyrochronology, which can achieve ∼20% precision for the majority of these stars. We find that only ∼5% of the sample have asteroseismic ages and ∼20% have gyrochronal ages, with just ∼2% having constraints from both methods.

For stars with multiple published measurements, the median reported statistical uncertainties are slightly smaller than the systematic uncertainties: ∼9% versus ∼12% for asteroseismology and ∼16% versus ∼18% for gyrochronology.

The scarcity of precise stellar ages in this sample highlights the need for a concerted effort to obtain robust age constraints in advance of HWO; this catalog is intended as a living resource that will be regularly updated in the lead-up to the mission.

Austin T. Ware, Katelyn Ruppert, Patrick A. Young

Comments: 16 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, Accepted to ApJ
Subjects: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:2605.12647 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:2605.12647v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.12647
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Related DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae69d7
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Submission history
From: Austin Ware
[v1] Tue, 12 May 2026 18:44:13 UTC (1,013 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12647

Astrobiology, Astronomy,