Probing the deep end of the Milky Way with \emph{Kepler}: Asteroseismic analysis of 854 faint Red Giants misclassified as Cool Dwarfs

TL;DR

This study reanalyzed Kepler data and identified 854 faint red giants misclassified as cool dwarfs, expanding the sample of distant halo giants and providing new insights into galactic structure.

Contribution

It presents the first large-scale asteroseismic analysis of stars previously misclassified, revealing a significant population of distant halo giants and refining stellar parameters.

Findings

2% of stars show red giant oscillations despite classification as dwarfs

404 stars are located beyond 5 kpc, indicating distant halo giants

The sample includes significantly fainter and less massive giants than previously known

Abstract

Asteroseismology has proven to be an excellent tool to determine not only the global stellar properties with a good precision but also to infer stellar structure, dynamics, and evolution for a large sample of Kepler stars. Prior to the launch of the mission the properties of Kepler targets were inferred from broadband photometry, leading to the Input Catalog (KIC Brown et al. 2011). The KIC was later revised in the Kepler Star Properties Catalog (Huber et al. 2014), based on literature values and an asteroseismic analysis of stars which were unclassified in the KIC. Here we present an asteroseismic analysis of 45,400 stars which were classified as dwarfs in the Kepler Star Properties Catalog. We found that around 2% of the sample shows acoustic modes in the typical frequency range that put them in the red-giant category rather than cool dwarfs. We analyse the asteroseismic properties of these stars, derive their surface gravities, masses, and radii and present updated effective temperatures and distances. We show that the sample is significantly fainter than the previously known oscillating giants in the Kepler field, with the faintest stars reaching down to a Kepler magnitude, Kp~16. We demonstrate that 404 stars are at distances beyond 5 kpc and that the stars are significantly less massive than for the original Kepler red-giant sample, consistent with a population of distant halo giants. A comparison with a galactic population model shows that up to 40 stars might be genuine halo giants, which would increase the number of known asteroseismic halo stars by a factor of 4. The detections presented here will provide a valuable sample for galactic archeology studies.