The Impact of Gaia DR1 on Asteroseismic Inferences from Kepler

Abstract

The Kepler mission has been fantastic for asteroseismology of solar-type stars, but the targets are typically quite distant. As a consequence, the reliability of asteroseismic modeling has been limited by the precision of additional constraints from high-resolution spectroscopy and parallax measurements. A precise luminosity is particularly useful to minimize potential biases due to the intrinsic correlation between stellar mass and initial helium abundance. We have applied the latest version of the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal (AMP) to the complete Kepler data sets for 30 stars with known rotation rates and chromospheric activity levels. We compare the stellar properties derived with and without the measured parallaxes from the first data release of Gaia. We find that in most cases the masses and ages inferred from asteroseismology shift within their uncertainties. For a few targets that show larger shifts, the updated stellar properties only strengthen previous conclusions about anomalous rotation in middle-aged stars.

5 pages, 3 figures, for Proceedings of the 22nd Los Alamos Stellar Pulsation Conference, posted for open peer review

References in corpus (12)

• Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
• Standing on the shoulders of Dwarfs: the $Kepler$ asteroseismic LEGACY sample I - oscillation mode parameters
• The effect of magnetic topology on thermally-driven winds: towards a general formulation of the braking law
• Calibrating Gyrochronology using Kepler Asteroseismic targets
• Asteroseismology for "à la carte" stellar age-dating and weighing: Age and mass of the CoRoT exoplanet host HD 52265
• Stellar Evidence that the Solar Dynamo may be in Transition
• Discovery of a 1.6-year Magnetic Activity Cycle in the Exoplanet Host Star iota Horologii
• A Stellar Model-fitting Pipeline for Asteroseismic Data from the Kepler Mission
• Magnetic Activity Cycles in the Exoplanet Host Star epsilon Eridani
• Characterizing solar-type stars from full-length Kepler data sets using the Asteroseismic Modeling Portal
• Magnetic variability in the young solar analog KIC 10644253: Observations from the Kepler satellite and the HERMES spectrograph
• The Sun-like activity of the solar twin 18 Scorpii