Pulsations and planets: the asteroseismology-extrasolar-planet connection

TL;DR

This paper explores the intersection of asteroseismology and exoplanet research, highlighting how stellar pulsations can aid in discovering and characterizing exoplanets through high-precision photometric observations and combined analysis.

Contribution

It introduces innovative methods leveraging stellar pulsations for exoplanet detection and emphasizes the synergy between asteroseismology and exoplanet science in current and future space missions.

Findings

Stellar pulsations can be used to detect exoplanets.

Combined asteroseismology and exoplanet data improve system characterization.

Space missions are increasingly integrating these methods.

Abstract

The disciplines of asteroseismology and extrasolar planet science overlap methodically in the branch of high-precision photometric time series observations. Light curves are, amongst others, useful to measure intrinsic stellar variability due to oscillations, as well as to discover and characterize those extrasolar planets that transit in front of their host stars, periodically causing shallow dips in the observed brightness. Both fields ultimately derive fundamental parameters of stellar and planetary objects, allowing to study for example the physics of various classes of pulsating stars, or the variety of planetary systems, in the overall context of stellar and planetary system formation and evolution. Both methods typically also require extensive spectroscopic follow-up to fully explore the dynamic characteristics of the processes under investigation. In particularly interesting cases, a combination of observed pulsations and signatures of a planet allows to characterize a system's components to a very high degree of completeness by combining complementary information. The planning of the relevant space missions has consequently converged with respect to science cases, where at the outset there was primarily a coincidence in instrumentation and techniques. Whether space- or ground-based, a specific type of stellar pulsations can themselves be used in an innovative way to search for extrasolar planets. Results from this additional method at the interface of stellar pulsation studies and exoplanet hunts in a beyond-mainstream area are presented.