The Asteroseismic Potential of Tess: Exoplanet-Host Stars

Abstract

New insights on stellar evolution and stellar interior physics are being made possible by asteroseismology. Throughout the course of the Kepler mission, asteroseismology has also played an important role in the characterization of exoplanet-host stars and their planetary systems. The upcoming NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be performing a near all-sky survey for planets that transit bright nearby stars. In addition, its excellent photometric precision, combined with its fine time sampling and long intervals of uninterrupted observations, will enable asteroseismology of solar-type and red-giant stars. Here we develop a simple test to estimate the detectability of solar-like oscillations in TESS photometry of any given star. Based on an all-sky stellar and planetary synthetic population, we go on to predict the asteroseismic yield of the TESS mission, placing emphasis on the yield of exoplanet-host stars for which we expect to detect solar-like oscillations. This is done for both the target stars (observed at a 2-minute cadence) and the full-frame-image stars (observed at a 30-minute cadence). A similar exercise is also conducted based on a compilation of known host stars. We predict that TESS will detect solar-like oscillations in a few dozen target hosts (mainly subgiant stars but also in a smaller number of F dwarfs), in up to 200 low-luminosity red-giant hosts, and in over 100 solar-type and red-giant known hosts, thereby leading to a threefold improvement in the asteroseismic yield of exoplanet-host stars when compared to Keplerʼs.

Know the Planet, Know the Star: Precise Stellar Densities from Kepler Transit Light Curves

“…We note that, although TESS will observe brighter stars than Kepler, its asteroseismic limit will be several magnitudes brighter (∼ 8 th magnitude) due to its small aperture (Campante et al 2016;Ricker et al 2014), and therefore that this transit-based method will be invaluable in characterizing TESS stars which are inaccessible to asteroseismology.…”

Asteroseismic modelling of the Binary HD 176465

“…Future missions such as TESS [6] and PLATO [25] are expected to increase asteroseismic data for similar systems. This will help in setting tight constraints on the physics used in stellar evolution and asteroseismology.…”

Synergies Between Asteroseismology and Exoplanetary Science

“…11; Huber, 2015b) have demonstrated that these planets can be used to address key questions in exoplanetary science such as the effects of host star evolution on the radius inflation of hot Jupiters (Grunblatt et al, 2016). A particularly promising possibility to extend this synergy are full-frame images obtained by the TESS mission, which are expected to yield several hundred asteroseismic exoplanethost stars (Campante et al, 2016). Preliminary simulations have shown that lowluminosity RGB stars in the ecliptic poles with 1 year coverage can also be used to measure rotational splittings, and hence extend the study of exoplanet obliquities of systems similar to Kepler-56 (see Sect.…”