Characterising the asteroseismic Red Clump standard candle in Gaia magnitude, colour, metallicity and alpha abundance

When stars of solar-like masses evolve along the red giant branch, their degenerate cores will eventually ignite Helium fusion. The event these stars undergo is called the Helium flash, after which they will settle onto a region of the HR diagram called the Red Clump. Because these stars ignite Helium at near-identical core masses, they also have similar magnitudes. This allows us to use Red Clump stars a standard candles, and the better we understand the physics of the Clump, the better this standard candle becomes.

Recent studies (e.g. Hall et al. 2019, Chan & Bovy 2020) have used Gaia DR2 to look at the magnitude and spread of the Red Clump, and how these change with properties such as colour, metallicity, and abundance of alpha-elements. However with the precision of Gaia eDR3, and spectroscopic data afforded to us by APOGEE and soon the full Gaia DR3, we can extend this approach. In this talk, I outline how we are using a new Hierarchical Latent Variable Model to measure the correlations between fundamental stellar observables of Red Clump stars (identified using asteroseismology), and how this improves the available precision on the Red Clump standard candle.