Ages and fundamental properties of Kepler exoplanet host stars from asteroseismology

By Silva Aguirre, G. Davies, S. Basu, J. Christensen-Dalsgaard, O. Creevey, T. Metcalfe, T. Bedding, L. Casagrande, Rasmus Handberg, M. Lund and 14 more. 2015

292 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a study of 33 {\it Kepler} planet-candidate host stars for which asteroseismic observations have sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio to allow extraction of individual pulsation frequencies. We implement a new Bayesian scheme that is flexible in its input to process individual oscillation frequencies, combinations of them, and average asteroseismic parameters, and derive robust fundamental properties for these targets. Applying this scheme to grids of evolutionary models yields stellar properties with median statistical uncertainties of 1.2\% (radius), 1.7\% (density), 3.3\% (mass), 4.4\% (distance), and 14\% (age), making this the exoplanet host-star sample with the most precise and uniformly determined fundamental parameters to date. We assess the systematics from changes in the solar abundances and mixing-length parameter, showing that they are smaller than the statistical errors. We also determine the stellar properties with three other fitting algorithms and explore the systematics arising from using different evolution and pulsation codes, resulting in 1\% in density and radius, and 2\% and 7\% in mass and age, respectively. We confirm previous findings of the initial helium abundance being a source of systematics comparable to our statistical uncertainties, and discuss future prospects for constraining this parameter by combining asteroseismology and data from space missions. Finally we compare our derived properties with those obtained using the global average asteroseismic observables along with effective temperature and metallicity, finding an excellent level of agreement. Owing to selection effects, our results show that the majority of the high signal-to-noise ratio asteroseismic {\it Kepler} host stars are older than the Sun.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fa3a07e7221b207f6d7e41ac1b05e7a97fa22cd8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Huber
2. D. Stello
3. Martin Asplund
4. A. Serenelli
5. E. Gaidos
6. W. Chaplin
7. S. Basu
8. Joss Bland-Hawthorn

In Instrumentation

1. D. Huber
2. D. Stello
3. E. Gaidos
4. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
5. W. Chaplin
6. E. Petigura
7. T. Bedding
8. J. V. van Saders

Citations in the corpus

• PLATO as it is: a legacy mission for Galactic archaeology (2017, unknown): “Additional crucial information, both on velocities and chemical abundances, will come from several ongoing/planned spectroscopic surveys such as RAVE (Kunder et al. 2017; Steinmetz et al. 2006), SEGUE-2 (Eisenstein et al. 2011; Yanny et al. 2009), APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2015; Majewski, APOGEE Team,”
• The Gaia–Kepler Stellar Properties Catalog. II. Planet Radius Demographics as a Function of Stellar Mass and Age (2020, background): “Asteroseismology provides precise stellar ages but is generally only available for a small subset of mostly evolved exoplanet host stars (Silva Aguirre et al. 2015).”
• Standing on the Shoulders of Dwarfs: the Kepler Asteroseismic LEGACY Sample. II. Radii, Masses, and Ages (2016, methodology): “4 of Silva Aguirre et al. 2015).”
• An asteroseismic view of the radius valley: stripped cores, not born rocky (2017, methodology): “Here, asteroseismology achieves this precision (Silva Aguirre et al. 2015; Lundkvist et al. 2016).”
• Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, methodology): “R. Sci. Liege, 8, 369 Robin A. C., Reylé C., Derrière S., Picaud S., 2003, A&A, 409, 523 Robin A. C., Reylé C., Fliri J., Czekaj M., Robert C. P., Martins A. M. M., 2014, A&A, 569, A13 Rocha-Pinto H. J., Maciel W. J., Scalo J., Flynn C., 2000, A&A, 358, 850 Rosvick J. M., Vandenberg D. A., 1998, ”
• Standing on the Shoulders of Dwarfs: the Kepler Asteroseismic LEGACY Sample. I. Oscillation Mode Parameters (2016, background): “The frequencies reported here will be modeled in the accompanying paper by Silva Aguirre et al. (2016, hereafter Paper II).”
• Asteroseismology and Gaia: Testing Scaling Relations Using 2200 Kepler Stars with TGAS Parallaxes (2017, methodology): “However, subsequent work by Silva Aguirre et al. (2017) using a sample of ≈60 nearby dwarfs revealed a systematic offset between TGAS and asteroseismology, in agreement with results from eclipsing binaries by Stassun & Torres (2016b) and ground-based parallaxes for dwarfs at <25 pc (Jao et al. 2016)”
• The Updated BaSTI Stellar Evolution Models and Isochrones. I. Solar-scaled Calculations (2018, background): “…greatly and thus further extend the impact of asteroseismology in the fields of stellar physics (e.g., Beck et al. 2011; Verma et al. 2014), exoplanet studies (Huber et al. 2013; Silva Aguirre et al. 2015, e.g.,), and Galactic archaeology (e.g., Casagrande et al. 2016; Silva Aguirre et al. 2017).”
• The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, background): “Our overall science goal is to carry out chemical tagging (e.g., Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn 2002; De Silva et al. 2006; Bland-Hawthorn et al. 2010b) within this data set, identifying stars that formed at the same time and place by matching their abundance patterns.”