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This article describes a moving-windowed autocorrelation technique which, when applied to an asteroseismic Fourier power spectrum, can be used to automatically detect the frequency of maximum p-mode power, large and small separations, mean p-mode linewidth, and constrain the stellar inclination angle and rotational splitting. The technique is illustrated using data from the CoRoT and Kepler space telescopes and tested using artificial data.
Asteroseismology is well-established in astronomy as the gold standard for determining precise and accurate fundamental stellar properties like masses, radii, and ages. Several tools have been developed for asteroseismic analyses but many of them are closed-source and therefore not accessible to the general astronomy community. Here we present $texttt{pySYD}$, a Python package for detecting solar-like oscillations and measuring global asteroseismic parameters. $texttt{pySYD}$ was adapted from the IDL-based $texttt{SYD}$ pipeline, which was extensively used to measure asteroseismic parameters for $textit{Kepler}$ stars. $texttt{pySYD}$ was developed using the same well-tested methodology and comes with several new improvements to provide accessible and reproducible results. Well-documented, open-source asteroseismology software that has been benchmarked against closed-source tools are critical to ensure the reproducibility of legacy results from the $textit{Kepler}$ mission. Moreover, $texttt{pySYD}$ will also be a promising tool for the broader astronomy community to analyze current and forthcoming data from the NASA TESS mission.
We present two novel methods for the estimation of the angular power spectrum of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies. We assume an absolute CMB experiment with arbitrary asymmetric beams and arbitrary sky coverage. The methods differ from earlier ones in that the power spectrum is estimated directly from time-ordered data, without first compressing the data into a sky map, and they take into account the effect of asymmetric beams. In particular, they correct the beam-induced leakage from temperature to polarization. The methods are applicable to a case where part of the sky has been masked out to remove foreground contamination, leaving a pure CMB signal, but incomplete sky coverage. The first method (DQML) is derived as the optimal quadratic estimator, which simultaneously yields an unbiased spectrum estimate and minimizes its variance. We successfully apply it to multipoles up to $ell$=200. The second method is derived as a weak-signal approximation from the first one. It yields an unbiased estimate for the full multipole range, but relaxes the requirement of minimal variance. We validate the methods with simulations for the 70 GHz channel of {tt Planck} surveyor, and demonstrate that we are able to correct the beam effects in the $TT$, $EE$, $BB$, and $TE$ spectra up to multipole $ell$=1500. Together the two methods cover the complete multipole range with no gap in between.
Cosmological neutrinos have their greatest influence in voids: these are the regions with the highest neutrino to dark matter density ratios. The marked power spectrum can be used to emphasize low density regions over high density regions, and therefore is potentially much more sensitive than the power spectrum to the effects of neutrino masses. Using 22,000 N-body simulations from the Quijote suite, we quantify the information content in the marked power spectrum of the matter field, and show that it outperforms the standard power spectrum by setting constraints improved by a factor larger than 2 on all cosmological parameters. The combination of marked and standard power spectrum allows to place a 4.3{sigma} constraint on the minimum sum of the neutrino masses with a volume equal to 1 (Gpc/h)^3 and without CMB priors. Combinations of different marked power spectra yield a 6{sigma} constraint within the same conditions.
In this paper, we propose efficient probabilistic algorithms for several problems regarding the autocorrelation spectrum. First, we present a quantum algorithm that samples from the Walsh spectrum of any derivative of $f()$. Informally, the autocorrelation coefficient of a Boolean function $f()$ at some point $a$ measures the average correlation among the values $f(x)$ and $f(x oplus a)$. The derivative of a Boolean function is an extension of autocorrelation to correlation among multiple values of $f()$. The Walsh spectrum is well-studied primarily due to its connection to the quantum circuit for the Deutsch-Jozsa problem. We extend the idea to Higher-order Deutsch-Jozsa quantum algorithm to obtain points corresponding to large absolute values in the Walsh spectrum of a certain derivative of $f()$. Further, we design an algorithm to sample the input points according to squares of the autocorrelation coefficients. Finally we provide a different set of algorithms for estimating the square of a particular coefficient or cumulative sum of their squares.
With the observations of an unprecedented number of oscillating subgiant stars expected from NASAs TESS mission, the asteroseismic characterization of subgiant stars will be a vital task for stellar population studies and for testing our theories of stellar evolution. To determine the fundamental properties of a large sample of subgiant stars efficiently, we developed a deep learning method that estimates distributions of fundamental parameters like age and mass over a wide range of input physics by learning from a grid of stellar models varied in eight physical parameters. We applied our method to four Kepler subgiant stars and compare our results with previously determined estimates. Our results show good agreement with previous estimates for three of them (KIC 11026764, KIC 10920273, KIC 11395018). With the ability to explore a vast range of stellar parameters, we determine that the remaining star, KIC 10005473, is likely to have an age 1 Gyr younger than its previously determined estimate. Our method also estimates the efficiency of overshooting, undershooting, and microscopic diffusion processes, from which we determined that the parameters governing such processes are generally poorly-constrained in subgiant models. We further demonstrate our methods utility for ensemble asteroseismology by characterizing a sample of 30 Kepler subgiant stars, where we find a majority of our age, mass, and radius estimates agree within uncertainties from more computationally expensive grid-based modelling techniques.