Effect of Kepler calibration on global seismic and background parameters

TL;DR

This study assesses how calibration corrections in Kepler Data Release 25 affect the derived global seismic and background parameters of solar analogs, highlighting the importance of data quality for stellar analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of seismic and background parameters derived from corrected and uncorrected Kepler data releases, emphasizing the impact of calibration issues.

Findings

Significant differences in seismic parameters between data releases.

Calibration corrections improve the accuracy of stellar parameter estimation.

Preliminary results highlight the need for reanalysis of previous seismic studies.

Abstract

Calibration issues associated to scrambled collateral smear affecting the Kepler short-cadence data were discovered in the Data Release 24 and were found to be present in all the previous data releases since launch. In consequence, a new Data Release 25 was reprocessed to correct for these problems. We perform here a preliminary study to evaluate the impact on the extracted global seismic and background parameters between data releases. We analyze the sample of seismic solar analogs observed by Kepler in short cadence between Q5 and Q17. We start with this set of stars as it constitutes the best sample to put the Sun into context along its evolution, and any significant differences on the seismic and background parameters need to be investigated before any further studies of this sample can take place. We use the A2Z pipeline to derive both global seismic parameters and background parameters from the Data Release 25 and previous data releases and report on the measured differences.