The Kepler Asteroseismic Investigation: Scientific goals and the first results

TL;DR

The Kepler mission's asteroseismic program has achieved unprecedented results in studying stellar interiors, significantly advancing our understanding of stellar structure and evolution through detailed analysis of data from the first seven months.

Contribution

This paper presents the initial results of Kepler's asteroseismic investigations, demonstrating substantial improvements over previous studies and highlighting the potential for future stellar research.

Findings

First results show orders of magnitude improvement in data quality.

Detailed insights into stellar interiors are now possible.

Future analysis will greatly enhance understanding of stellar evolution.

Abstract

Kepler is a NASA mission designed to detect exoplanets and characterize the properties of exoplanetary systems. Kepler also includes an asteroseismic programme which is being conducted through the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC), whose 400 members are organized into 13 working groups by type of variable star. So far data have been available from the first 7 month of the mission containing a total of 2937 targets observed at a 1-min. cadence for periods between 10 days and 7 months. The goals of the asteroseismic part of the Kepler project is to perform detailed studies of stellar interiors. The first results of the asteroseismic analysis are orders of magnitude better than seen before, and this bodes well for how the future analysis of Kepler data for many types of stars will impact our general understanding of stellar structure and evolution.