Ages and fundamental properties of Kepler exoplanet host stars from asteroseismology

TL;DR

This study uses high-quality asteroseismic data and a new Bayesian method to precisely determine fundamental properties of 33 Kepler exoplanet host stars, improving accuracy and assessing systematic uncertainties.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible Bayesian scheme for extracting stellar parameters from individual oscillation frequencies, achieving the most precise and uniform measurements for Kepler host stars to date.

Findings

Median uncertainties: 1.2% radius, 1.7% density, 3.3% mass.

Systematics from model assumptions are smaller than statistical errors.

Most high signal-to-noise Kepler host stars are older than the Sun.

Abstract

We present a study of 33 {\it Kepler} planet-candidate host stars for which asteroseismic observations have sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio to allow extraction of individual pulsation frequencies. We implement a new Bayesian scheme that is flexible in its input to process individual oscillation frequencies, combinations of them, and average asteroseismic parameters, and derive robust fundamental properties for these targets. Applying this scheme to grids of evolutionary models yields stellar properties with median statistical uncertainties of 1.2\% (radius), 1.7\% (density), 3.3\% (mass), 4.4\% (distance), and 14\% (age), making this the exoplanet host-star sample with the most precise and uniformly determined fundamental parameters to date. We assess the systematics from changes in the solar abundances and mixing-length parameter, showing that they are smaller than the statistical errors. We also determine the stellar properties with three other fitting algorithms and explore the systematics arising from using different evolution and pulsation codes, resulting in 1\% in density and radius, and 2\% and 7\% in mass and age, respectively. We confirm previous findings of the initial helium abundance being a source of systematics comparable to our statistical uncertainties, and discuss future prospects for constraining this parameter by combining asteroseismology and data from space missions. Finally we compare our derived properties with those obtained using the global average asteroseismic observables along with effective temperature and metallicity, finding an excellent level of agreement. Owing to selection effects, our results show that the majority of the high signal-to-noise ratio asteroseismic {\it Kepler} host stars are older than the Sun.