Modeling the Asteroseismic Surface Term across the HR Diagram

TL;DR

This study evaluates various methods for correcting the asteroseismic surface term across different stellar types, finding that the Ball & Gizon (2014) two-term model performs best for a wide range of stars.

Contribution

It systematically tests surface term correction models across the HR diagram, recommending the Ball & Gizon (2014) model as the most effective.

Findings

The two-term Ball & Gizon model outperforms others across the HR diagram.

Surface term correction effectiveness varies with stellar type and evolutionary stage.

The recommended model improves the accuracy of stellar property estimations.

Abstract

Asteroseismology is a powerful tool that can precisely characterize the mass, radius, and other properties of field stars. However, our inability to properly model the near-surface layers of stars creates a frequency-dependent frequency difference between the observed and the modeled frequencies, usually referred to as the "surface term". This surface term can add significant errors to the derived stellar properties unless removed properly. In this paper we simulate surface terms across a significant portion of the HR diagram, exploring four different masses ($M=0.8, 1.0, 1.2$, and $1.5$ M$_\odot$) at five metallicities ($[\rm{Fe/H}]=0.5, 0.0, -0.5 ,-1.0, and -1.5$) from main sequence to red giants for stars with $T_{\rm{eff}}<6500 K$ and explore how well the most common ways of fitting and removing the surface term actually perform. We find that the two-term model proposed by Ball & Gizon (2014) works much better than other models across a large portion of the HR diagram, including the red giants, leading us to recommend its use for future asteroseismic analyses.