The asteroseismic potential of TESS: exoplanet-host stars

TL;DR

This paper assesses TESS's potential for asteroseismology of exoplanet-host stars, predicting it will significantly enhance the detection of solar-like oscillations and improve stellar characterization compared to Kepler.

Contribution

It develops a simple test for oscillation detectability and predicts TESS's asteroseismic yield for exoplanet-host stars using synthetic and known star data.

Findings

TESS will detect solar-like oscillations in several dozen target stars.

Up to 200 low-luminosity red giants will show detectable oscillations.

The asteroseismic yield of exoplanet-host stars will triple compared to Kepler.

Abstract

New insights on stellar evolution and stellar interiors physics are being made possible by asteroseismology. Throughout the course of the Kepler mission, asteroseismology has also played an important role in the characterization of exoplanet-host stars and their planetary systems. The upcoming NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will be performing a near all-sky survey for planets that transit bright nearby stars. In addition, its excellent photometric precision, combined with its fine time sampling and long intervals of uninterrupted observations, will enable asteroseismology of solar-type and red-giant stars. Here we develop a simple test to estimate the detectability of solar-like oscillations in TESS photometry of any given star. Based on an all-sky stellar and planetary synthetic population, we go on to predict the asteroseismic yield of the TESS mission, placing emphasis on the yield of exoplanet-host stars for which we expect to detect solar-like oscillations. This is done for both the target stars (observed at a 2-min cadence) and the full-frame-image stars (observed at a 30-min cadence). A similar exercise is also conducted based on a compilation of known host stars. We predict that TESS will detect solar-like oscillations in a few dozen target hosts (mainly subgiant stars but also in a smaller number of F dwarfs), in up to 200 low-luminosity red-giant hosts, and in over 100 solar-type and red-giant known hosts, thereby leading to a threefold improvement in the asteroseismic yield of exoplanet-host stars when compared to Kepler's.