The recent launch of the Kepler space telescope brings the opportunity to study oscillations systematically in large numbers of solar-like stars. In the framework of the asteroFLAG project, we have developed an automated pipeline to estimate global oscillation parameters, such as the frequency of maximum power (nu_max) and the large frequency spacing (Delta_nu), for a large number of time series. We present an effective method based on the autocorrelation function to find excess power and use a scaling relation to estimate granulation timescales as initial conditions for background modelling. We derive reliable uncertainties for nu_max and Delta_nu through extensive simulations. We have tested the pipeline on about 2000 simulated Kepler stars with magnitudes of V~7-12 and were able to correctly determine nu_max and Delta_nu for about half of the sample. For about 20%, the returned large frequency spacing is accurate enough to determine stellar radii to a 1% precision. We conclude that the methods presented here are a promising approach to process the large amount of data expected from Kepler.
@article{arxiv.0910.2764,
title = {Automated extraction of oscillation parameters for Kepler observations of solar-type stars},
author = {Daniel Huber and Dennis Stello and Timothy R. Bedding and William J. Chaplin and Torben Arentoft and Pierre-Olivier Quirion and Hans Kjeldsen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.2764},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
14 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in Communications in Asteroseismology