Characterisation of red-giant stars in the public Kepler data

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Kepler's public data to characterize red-giant stars using solar-like oscillations, revealing different stellar populations and estimating their fundamental properties.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale asteroseismic analysis of red giants in Kepler data, identifying stellar populations and estimating their fundamental parameters.

Findings

70% of red giants show detectable oscillations

Identified different red-giant populations

Estimated stellar properties from oscillations

Abstract

The first public release of long-cadence stellar photometric data collected by the NASA Kepler mission has now been made available. In this paper we characterise the red-giant (G-K) stars in this large sample in terms of their solar-like oscillations. We use published methods and well-known scaling relations in the analysis. Just over 70% of the red giants in the sample show detectable solar-like oscillations, and from these oscillations we are able to estimate the fundamental properties of the stars. This asteroseismic analysis reveals different populations: low-luminosity H-shell burning red-giant branch stars, cool high-luminosity red giants on the red-giant branch and He-core burning clump and secondary-clump giants.