Red giants are evolved stars that have exhausted the supply of hydrogen in their cores and instead burn hydrogen in a surrounding shell 1,2 . Once a red giant is sufficiently evolved, the helium in the core also undergoes fusion 3 . Outstanding issues in our understanding of red giants include uncertainties in the amount of mass lost at the surface before helium ignition and the amount of internal mixing from rotation and other processes 4 . Progress is hampered by our inability to distinguish between red giants burning helium in the core and those still only burning hydrogen in a shell. Asteroseismology offers a way forward, being a powerful tool for probing the internal structures of stars using their natural oscillation frequencies 5 . Here we report observations of gravity-mode period spacings in red giants 6 that permit a distinction between evolutionary stages to be made. We use high-precision photometry obtained by the Kepler spacecraft over more than a year to measure oscillations in several hundred red giants. We find many stars whose dipole modes show sequences with approximately regular period spacings. These stars fall into two clear groups, allowing us to distinguish unambiguously between hydrogen-shell-burning stars (period spacing mostly 50 seconds) and those that are also burning helium (period spacing 100 to 300 seconds).Oscillations in red giants, like those in the Sun, are thought to be excited by near-surface convection. The observed oscillation spectra are indeed remarkably Sun-like, with a broad range of radial and nonradial modes in a characteristic comb pattern [7][8][9][10][11]
The Kepler space telescope detects exoplanets by measuring periodic dimmings of light as a planet passes in front of its host star (1). The majority of the ∼ 150,000 targets observed by Kepler are unevolved stars near the main sequence, because those stars provide the best prospect for detecting habitable planets similar to Earth (2). In contrast, the temperature and surface gravity of indicate that it is an evolved star with exhausted hydrogen in its core, and that it started burning hydrogen in a shell surrounding an inert Helium core. Stellar evolutionary theory predicts that our Sun will evolve into a low-luminosity red giant similar in size to Kepler-56 in roughly 7 billion years.The Kepler planet search pipeline detected two planet candidates orbiting (designated as KOI-1241) (3) with periods of 10.50 and 21.41 days, a nearly 2:1 commensurability. The observation of transit time variations caused by gravitational interactions 2 showed that the two candidates represent objects orbiting the same star, and modeling of these variations led to upper limits on their masses that place them firmly in the planetary regime (4). Kepler-56 is the most evolved star observed by Kepler with more than one detected planet.Transit observations lead to measurements of planet properties relative to stellar properties, and hence accurate knowledge of the host star is required to characterize the system. Asteroseismology enables inference of stellar properties through the measurement of oscillations excited by near-surface convection (5). The power spectrum of the Kepler-56 data after removing the planetary transits shows a regular series of peaks ( Fig. 1), which are characteristic of stellar oscillations. By combining the measured oscillation frequencies with the effective temperature and chemical composition obtained from spectroscopy, we were able to precisely determine the properties of the host star (6). Kepler-56 is more than four times as large as the Sun and its mass is 30% greater (Table 1).Non-radial oscillations in evolved stars are mixed modes, behaving like pressure modes in the envelope and like gravity modes in the core (7,8). Unlike pressure-dominated mixed modes, gravity-dominated mixed modes have frequencies that are shifted from the regular asymptotic spacing. Mixed modes are also approximately equally spaced in period (9). We measured the average period spacing between dipole (l = 1) modes in Kepler-56 to be 50 seconds, consistent with a first ascent red giant (10).Individual mixed dipole modes are further split into multiplets as a result of stellar rotation. Because the modes in each multiplet are on average expected to be excited to very nearly equal amplitudes, the observed relative amplitudes depend only on viewing angle relative to the stellar rotation axis (11). For Kepler-56 several mixed dipole modes show triplets (Fig. 1). A rotation axis perpendicular to the line of sight (inclination i = 90 • for pressure-dominated modes. Simulations confirmed that the inclination measurements are not strongly...
We present a detailed spectroscopic study of 93 solar-type stars that are targets of the NASA/Kepler mission and provide detailed chemical composition of each target. We find that the overall metallicity is well represented by Fe lines. Relative abundances of light elements (CNO) and α elements are generally higher for low-metallicity stars. Our spectroscopic analysis benefits from the accurately measured surface gravity from the asteroseismic analysis of the Kepler light curves. The accuracy on the log g parameter is better than 0.03 dex and is held fixed in the analysis. We compare our T eff determination with a recent colour calibration of V T − K S [TYCHO V magnitude minus Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) K S magnitude] and find very good agreement and a scatter of only 80 K, showing that for other nearby Kepler targets, this index can be used. The asteroseismic log g values agree very well with the classical determination using Fe I-Fe II balance, although we find a small systematic Based on observations obtained at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) which is operated by the National Parameters of solar-type Kepler targets 123 offset of 0.08 dex (asteroseismic log g values are lower). The abundance patterns of metals, α elements and the light elements (CNO) show that a simple scaling by [Fe/H] is adequate to represent the metallicity of the stars, except for the stars with metallicity below −0.3, where α-enhancement becomes important. However, this is only important for a very small fraction of the Kepler sample. We therefore recommend that a simple scaling with [Fe/H] be employed in the asteroseismic analyses of large ensembles of solar-type stars.
We have used asteroseismology to determine fundamental properties for 66 Kepler planet-candidate host stars, with typical uncertainties of 3% and 7% in radius and mass, respectively. The results include new asteroseismic solutions for four host stars with confirmed planets and increase the total number of Kepler host stars with asteroseismic solutions to 77. A comparison with stellar properties in the planet-candidate catalog by Batalha et al. shows that radii for subgiants and giants obtained from spectroscopic follow-up are systematically too low by up to a factor of 1.5, while the properties for unevolved stars are in good agreement. We furthermore apply asteroseismology to confirm that a large majority of cool main-sequence hosts are indeed dwarfs and not misclassified giants. Using the revised stellar properties, we recalculate the radii for 107 planet candidates in our sample, and comment on candidates for which the radii change from a previously giant-planet/brown-dwarf/stellar regime to a sub-Jupiter size, or vice versa. A comparison of stellar densities from asteroseismology with densities derived from transit models in Batalha et al. assuming circular orbits shows significant disagreement for more than half of the sample due to systematics in the modeled impact parameters, or due to planet candidates which may be in eccentric orbits. Finally, we investigate tentative correlations between host-star masses and planet-candidate radii, orbital periods, and multiplicity, but caution that these results may be influenced by the small sample size and detection biases.
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