A new method to detect solar-like oscillations at very low S/N using statistical significance testing
Abstract
We introduce a new method to detect solar-like oscillations in frequency power spectra of stellar observations, under conditions of very low signal to noise. The Moving-Windowed-Power-Search, or MWPS, searches the power spectrum for signatures of excess power, over and above slowly varying (in frequency) background contributions from stellar granulation and shot or instrumental noise. We adopt a false-alarm approach (Chaplin et al. 2011) to ascertain whether flagged excess power, which is consistent with the excess expected from solar-like oscillations, is hard to explain by chance alone (and hence a candidate detection). We apply the method to solar photometry data, whose quality was systematically degraded to test the performance of the MWPS at low signal-to-noise ratios. We also compare the performance of the MWPS against the frequently applied power-spectrum-of-power-spectrum (PSxPS) detection method. The MWPS is found to outperform the PSxPS method.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1209.3792,
title = {A new method to detect solar-like oscillations at very low S/N using statistical significance testing},
author = {Mikkel N. Lund and William J. Chaplin and Hans Kjeldsen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.3792},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
10 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, Added references