Asteroseismic determination of fundamental parameters of sun-like stars using multi-layered neural networks

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that multi-layered neural networks can rapidly and accurately determine fundamental stellar parameters from spectroscopic and seismic data, facilitating large-scale analysis of stars from space observatories.

Contribution

The authors develop and validate a neural network-based method for inferring stellar evolutionary parameters from observational data, offering a fast and automated alternative to traditional techniques.

Findings

Neural networks accurately predict stellar parameters across a broad range.

The method is computationally inexpensive and fully automated.

Results agree well with other established inference methods.

Abstract

The advent of space-based observatories such as CoRoT and Kepler has enabled the testing of our understanding of stellar evolution on thousands of stars. Evolutionary models typically require five input parameters, the mass, initial Helium abundance, initial metallicity, mixing- length (assumed to be constant over time), and the age to which the star must be evolved. Some of these parameters are also very useful in characterizing the associated planets and in studying galactic archaeology. How to obtain these parameters from observations rapidly and accurately, specifically in the context of surveys of thousands of stars, is an outstanding ques- tion, one that has eluded straightforward resolution. For a given star, we typically measure the effective temperature and surface metallicity spectroscopically and low-degree oscillation frequencies through space observatories. Here we demonstrate that statistical learning, using artificial neural networks, is successful in determining the evolutionary parameters based on spectroscopic and seismic measurements. Our trained networks show robustness over a broad range of parameter space, and critically, are entirely computationally inexpensive and fully automated. We analyze the observations of a few stars using this method and the results com- pare well to inferences obtained using other techniques. This method is both computationally cheap and inferentially accurate, paving the way for analyzing the vast quantities of stellar observations from past, current, and future missions.