No Arabic abstract
Context: Asteroseismology has entered a new era with the advent of the NASA Kepler mission. Long and continuous photometric observations of unprecedented quality are now available which have stimulated the development of a number of suites of innovative analysis tools. Aims: The power spectra of solar-like oscillations are an inexhaustible source of information on stellar structure and evolution. Robust methods are hence needed in order to infer both individual oscillation mode parameters and parameters describing non-resonant features, thus making a seismic interpretation possible. Methods: We present a comprehensive guide to the implementation of a Bayesian peak-bagging tool that employs a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Besides making it possible to incorporate relevant prior information through Bayes theorem, this tool also allows one to obtain the marginal probability density function for each of the fitted parameters. We apply this tool to a couple of recent asteroseismic data sets, namely, to CoRoT observations of HD 49933 and to ground-based observations made during a campaign devoted to Procyon. Results: The developed method performs remarkably well at constraining not only in the traditional case of extracting oscillation frequencies, but also when pushing the limit where traditional methods have difficulties. Moreover it provides an rigorous way of comparing competing models, such as the ridge identifications, against the asteroseismic data.
Asteroseismology is an exceptional tool for studying stars by using the properties of observed modes of oscillation. So far the process of performing an asteroseismic analysis of a star has remained somewhat esoteric and inaccessible to non-experts. In this software paper we describe PBjam, an open-source Python package for analyzing the frequency spectra of solar-like oscillators in a simple but principled and automated way. The aim of PBjam is to provide a set of easy-to-use tools to extract information about the radial and quadrupole oscillations in stars that oscillate like the Sun, which may then be used to infer bulk properties such as stellar mass, radius and age or even structure. Asteroseismology and its data analysis methods are becoming increasingly important as space-based photometric observatories are producing a wealth of new data, allowing asteroseismology to be applied in a wide range of contexts such as exoplanet, stellar structure and evolution, and Galactic population studies.
Filaments are very common physical phenomena on the Sun and are often taken as important proxies of solar magnetic activities. The study of filaments has become a hot topic in the space weather research. For a more comprehensive understanding of filaments, especially for an understanding of solar activities of multiple solar cycles, it is necessary to perform a combined multifeature analysis by constructing a data set of multiple solar cycle data. To achieve this goal, we constructed a centennial data set that covers the H$alpha$ data from five observatories around the world. During the data set construction, we encountered varieties of problems, such as data fusion, accurate determination of the solar edge, classifying data by quality, dynamic threshold, and so on, which arose mainly due to multiple sources and a large time span of data. But fortunately, these problems were well solved. The data set includes seven types of data products and eight types of feature parameters with which we can implement the functions of data searching and statistical analyses. It has the characteristics of better continuity and highly complementary to space observation data, especially in the wavelengths not covered by space observations, and covers many solar cycles (including more than 60 yr of high-cadence data). We expect that this new comprehensive data set as well as the tools will help researchers to significantly speed up their search for features or events of interest, for either statistical or case study purposes, and possibly help them get a better and more comprehensive understanding of solar filament mechanisms.
We study 23 previously published Kepler targets to perform a consistent grid-based Bayesian asteroseismic analysis and compare our results to those obtained via the Asteroseismic Modelling Portal (AMP). We find differences in the derived stellar parameters of many targets and their uncertainties. While some of these differences can be attributed to systematic effects between stellar evolutionary models, we show that the different methodologies deliver incompatible uncertainties for some parameters. Using non-adiabatic models and our capability to measure surface effects, we also investigate the dependency of these surface effects on the stellar parameters. Our results suggest a dependence of the magnitude of the surface effect on the mixing length parameter which also, but only minimally, affects the determination of stellar parameters. While some stars in our sample show no surface effect at all, the most significant surface effects are found for stars that are close to the Suns position in the HR diagram.
We comment on the potential for continuing asteroseismology of solar-type and red-giant stars in a 2-wheel Kepler Mission. Our main conclusion is that by targeting stars in the ecliptic it should be possible to perform high-quality asteroseismology, as long as favorable scenarios for 2-wheel pointing performance are met. Targeting the ecliptic would potentially facilitate unique science that was not possible in the nominal Mission, notably from the study of clusters that are significantly brighter than those in the Kepler field. Our conclusions are based on predictions of 2-wheel observations made by a space photometry simulator, with information provided by the Kepler Project used as input to describe the degraded pointing scenarios. We find that elevated levels of frequency-dependent noise, consistent with the above scenarios, would have a significant negative impact on our ability to continue asteroseismic studies of solar-like oscillators in the Kepler field. However, the situation may be much more optimistic for observations in the ecliptic, provided that pointing resets of the spacecraft during regular desaturations of the two functioning reaction wheels are accurate at the < 1 arcsec level. This would make it possible to apply a post-hoc analysis that would recover most of the lost photometric precision. Without this post-hoc correction---and the accurate re-pointing it requires---the performance would probably be as poor as in the Kepler-field case. Critical to our conclusions for both fields is the assumed level of pointing noise (in the short-term jitter and the longer-term drift). We suggest that further tests will be needed to clarify our results once more detail and data on the expected pointing performance becomes available, and we offer our assistance in this work.
... [C]urrent stellar models predict oscillation frequencies that are systematically affected by simplified modelling of the near-surface layers. We use three-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics simulations to better model the near-surface equilibrium structure of dwarfs with spectral types F3, G2, K0 and K5, and examine the differences between oscillation mode frequencies. ... We precisely match stellar models to the simulations gravities and effective temperatures at the surface, and to the temporally- and horizontally-averaged densities and pressures at their deepest points. We then replace the near-surface structure with that of the averaged simulation and compute the change in the oscillation mode frequencies. We also fit the differences using several parametric models currently available in the literature. The surface effect in the stars of solar-type and later is qualitatively similar and changes steadily with decreasing effective temperature. In particular, the point of greatest frequency difference decreases slightly as a fraction of the acoustic cut-off frequency and the overall scale of the surface effect decreases. The surface effect in the hot, F3-type star follows the same trend in scale (i.e. it is larger in magnitude) but shows a different overall variation with mode frequency. We find that the two-term fit by Ball & Gizon (2014) is best able to reproduce the surface terms across all four spectral types, although the scaled solar term and a modified Lorentzian function also match the three cooler simulations reasonably well. ... Our simplified results suggest that the surface effect is generally larger in hotter stars (and correspondingly smaller in cooler stars) and of similar shape in stars of solar type and cooler. However, we cannot presently predict whether this will remain so when other components of the surface effect are included.