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.

10 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS, Added references

References in corpus (5)

• Testing Scaling Relations for Solar-Like Oscillations from the Main Sequence to Red Giants using Kepler Data
• Granulation in Red Giants: observations by the Kepler mission and 3D convection simulations
• Predicting the detectability of oscillations in solar-type stars observed by Kepler
• Multisite campaign on the open cluster M67. II. Evidence for solar-like oscillations in red giant stars
• Modelling the Autocovariance of the Power Spectrum of a Solar-Type Oscillator

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Fundamental Properties of Kepler Planet-Candidate Host Stars using Asteroseismology
• Standing on the shoulders of Dwarfs: the $Kepler$ asteroseismic LEGACY sample I - oscillation mode parameters
• Automated preparation of Kepler time series of planet hosts for asteroseismic analysis
• What asteroseismology can do for exoplanets: Kepler-410A b is a Small Neptune around a bright star, in an eccentric orbit consistent with low obliquity
• K2P${}^2$ $-$ A photometry pipeline for the K2 mission
• Coefficients of variation for detecting solar-like oscillations