Population synthesis of RR Lyrae stars in the original $Kepler$ and $K2$ Fields of View

TL;DR

This study assesses the completeness of RR Lyrae star samples in Kepler and K2 fields by comparing observed data with synthetic models, revealing many faint stars are missing from these surveys.

Contribution

It introduces a method to evaluate the completeness of RR Lyrae star samples in Kepler and K2 fields using synthetic Galactic models calibrated with Catalina data.

Findings

Many faint RR Lyrae stars are missing from Kepler and K2 fields.

The method effectively estimates the fraction of known versus missing RR Lyrae stars.

Significant incompleteness affects the understanding of RR Lyrae populations in these fields.

Abstract

It is interesting to ask what fraction of the total available RR Lyrae (RRL) sample that falls in the $Kepler$ and $K2$ Fields of View (FoV) is known or discovered. In order assess the completeness of our sample we compared the known RRL sample in the $Kepler$ and $K2$ fields with synthetic Galactic models. The Catalina Sky Survey RRL sample was used to calibrate our method. We found that a large number of faint RRL stars is missing from $Kepler$ and $K2$ fields.