Detecting Solar-Like Oscillations in the Highest Mass TESS Giants

Abstract

Red-giant asteroseismology yields precise stellar parameters, making it a powerful tool for studying stellar structure and evolution, as demonstrated by the Kepler mission. However, due to Kepler's limited field of view, it primarily sampled the more populous low-mass red giants found outside of the Galactic plane, leading to limited detections of red giants above $3{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$. Here we use the all-sky TESS data to isolate 227 intermediate-mass candidates from large catalogs with a pre-selection based on photometric and spectroscopic data. We optimize TESS light curves using a boutique light curve detrending method with custom apertures. Compared to the MIT Quick Look Pipeline, this yields a 12% average increase in the power-to-background ratio within the oscillation envelope, even in the heavily crowded Galactic plane. We detect solar-like oscillations in 98 targets, including 43 with ${\mathrm{M}}_{\ast }>3{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$. Our sample also includes 10 stars having masses greater than $5{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$, among the highest-mass solar-like oscillators detected to date. From our detections, we find that the APOGEE DR19 spectroscopic $\log g$ is systematically larger by, on average, 0.23 dex compared to the seismic $\log g$. This offset is possibly due to the lack of intermediate-mass giants observed by Kepler, which was used to calibrate the spectroscopic $\log g$ in the APOGEE pipeline. Extending the same pre-selection criteria to TESS targets with Gaia XP spectroscopic parameters identifies up to 37,000 candidate intermediate-mass solar-like oscillators for follow-up and population studies.

15 pages, 10 figures

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