The currently operating space missions, as well as those that will be launched in the near future, (will) deliver high-quality data for millions of stellar objects. Since the majority of stellar astrophysical applications still (at least partly) rely
on spectroscopic data, an efficient tool for the analysis of medium- to high-resolution spectroscopy is needed. We aim at developing an efficient software package for the analysis of medium- to high-resolution spectroscopy of single stars and those in binary systems. The major requirements are that the code has a high performance, represents the state-of-the-art analysis tool, and provides accurate determinations of atmospheric parameters and chemical compositions for different types of stars. We use the method of atmosphere models and spectrum synthesis, which is one of the most commonly used approaches for the analysis of stellar spectra. Our Grid Search in Stellar Parameters (GSSP) code makes use of the OpenMPI implementation, which makes it possible to run in parallel mode. The method is first tested on the simulated data and is then applied to the spectra of real stellar objects. The majority of test runs on the simulated data were successful in the sense that we could recover the initially assumed sets of atmospheric parameters. We experimentally find the limits in signal-to-noise ratios of the input spectra, below which the final set of parameters gets significantly affected by the noise. Application of the GSSP package to the spectra of three Kepler stars, KIC11285625, KIC6352430, and KIC4931738, was also largely successful. We found an overall agreement of the final sets of the fundamental parameters with the original studies. For KIC6352430, we found that dependence of the light dilution factor on wavelength cannot be ignored, as it has significant impact on the determination of the atmospheric parameters of this binary system.
The space-missions MOST, CoRoT, and Kepler deliver a huge amount of high-quality photometric data suitable to study numerous pulsating stars. Our ultimate goal is a detection and analysis of an extended sample of Gamma Dor-type pulsating stars with
the aim to search for observational evidence of non-uniform period spacings and rotational splittings of gravity modes in main-sequence stars typically twice as massive as the Sun. We applied an automated supervised photometric classification method to select a sample of 69 Gamma Doradus candidate stars. We used an advanced method to extract the Kepler light curves from the pixel data information using custom masks. For 36 of the stars, we obtained high-resolution spectroscopy with the HERMES spectrograph installed at the Mercator telescope. We find that all stars for which spectroscopic estimates of Teff and logg are available fall into the region of the HR diagram where the Gamma Dor and Delta Sct instability strips overlap. The stars cluster in a 700 K window in effective temperature, logg measurements suggest luminosity class IV-V. From the Kepler photometry, we identify 45 Gamma Dor-type pulsators, 14 Gamma Dor/Delta Sct hybrids, and 10 stars which are classified as possibly Gamma Dor/Delta Sct hybrid pulsators. The results of photometric and spectroscopic classifications according to the type of variability are in perfect agreement. We find a clear correlation between the spectroscopically derived vsini and the frequencies of independent pulsation modes and show that it has nothing to do with rotational modulation of the stars but is related to their stellar pulsations. Our sample and frequency determinations offer a good starting point for seismic modelling of slow to moderately rotating Gamma Dor stars.
