The diameter and evolutionary state of Procyon A

Abstract

We report the angular diameter measurement obtained with the VINCI/VLTI instrument on the nearby star Procyon A (α CMi A, F5IV–V), at a relative precision of ±0.9%. We obtain a uniform disk angular diameter in the K band of mas and a limb darkened value of mas. Together with the hipparcos parallax, this gives a linear diameter of . We use this result in combination with spectroscopic, photometric and asteroseismic constraints to model this star with the CESAM code. One set of modeling parameters that reproduces the observations within their error bars are an age of 2314 Myr, an initial helium mass fraction and an initial mass ratio of heavy elements to hydrogen . We also computed the adiabatic oscillation spectrum of our model of Procyon A, giving a mean large frequency separation of Hz. This value is in agreement with the seismic observations by Martić et al. ([CITE], [CITE]). The interferometric diameter and the asteroseismic large frequency spacing together suggest a mass closer to 1.4 than to 1.5 . We conclude that Procyon is currently ending its life on the main sequence, as its luminosity class indicates.