Title: Stellar population synthesis based modelling of the Milky Way using asteroseismology of dwarfs and subgiants from Kepler,
Abstract: Early attempts to apply asteroseismology to study the Galaxy have already
shown unexpected discrepancies for the mass distribution of stars between the
Galactic models and the data; a result that is still unexplained. Here, we
revisit the analysis of the asteroseismic sample of dwarf and subgiant stars
observed by Kepler and investigate in detail the possible causes for the
reported discrepancy. We investigate two models of the Milky Way based on
stellar population synthesis, Galaxia and TRILEGAL. In agreement with previous
results, we find that TRILEGAL predicts more massive stars compared to Galaxia,
and that TRILEGAL predicts too many blue stars compared to 2MASS observations.
Both models fail to match the distribution of the stellar sample in $(\log
g,T_{\rm eff})$ space, pointing to inaccuracies in the models and/or the
assumed selection function. When corrected for this mismatch in $(\log g,T_{\rm
eff})$ space, the mass distribution calculated by Galaxia is broader and the
mean is shifted toward lower masses compared to that of the observed stars.
This behaviour is similar to what has been reported for the Kepler red giant
sample. The shift between the mass distributions is equivalent to a change of
2\% in $\nu_{\rm max}$, which is within the current uncertainty in the
$\nu_{\rm max}$ scaling relation. Applying corrections to the $\Delta \nu$
scaling relation predicted by the stellar models makes the observed mass
distribution significantly narrower, but there is no change to the mean.