Thanks to advances in asteroseismology, red giants have become astrophysical laboratories for probing the Milky Way. Eclipsing binaries allow us to directly measure stellar properties independently of asteroseismology, which we use to investigate why some red giants don't oscillate and test asteroseismic scaling relations for those that do. By combining orbital solutions, high-resolution spectroscopy, and stellar evolution models for a subset of eight eclipsing red giants observed by Kepler, we find short-period binaries with strong tidal forces and systems with active red giants are less likely to exhibit solar-like oscillations. We also preview the results from Gaulme et al. 2016 (submitted). We find asteroseismic scalings overestimate red giant radii by about 6% on average and masses by about 16% in ten systems observed by Kepler. Systematic overestimation of mass leads to underestimation of stellar age, which has important implications for ensemble asteroseismology applied to galactic studies.

{"references": ["Gaulme et al. 2016, submitted to ApJ", "Gaulme et al. 2014, ApJ, 785, 5", "Gaulme et al. 2013, ApJ, 767, 82", "Rawls et al. in prep", "Rawls et al. 2016, ApJ, 818, 108"]}

Poster #305. Postdoc Poster Award winner and subsequently invited to speak. Slides from that talk are included.