Aldebaran b's temperate past uncovered in planet search data

TL;DR

This study uncovers Aldebaran's past temperate conditions by detecting stellar oscillations in archival data, revealing insights into the star's mass and the historical insolation of its planet, with implications for asteroseismology.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel application of Gaussian Process-based CARMA models to detect stellar oscillations in sparse archival data, enabling asteroseismic analysis of red giants.

Findings

Aldebaran's mass estimated at 1.16 solar masses.

Evidence of acoustic oscillations confirmed with multiple methods.

Implication that the planet experienced Earth-like insolation in the star's past.

Abstract

The nearby red giant Aldebaran is known to host a gas giant planetary companion from decades of ground-based spectroscopic radial velocity measurements. Using Gaussian Process-based Continuous Auto-Regressive Moving Average (CARMA) models, we show that these historic data also contain evidence of acoustic oscillations in the star itself, and verify this result with further dedicated ground-based spectroscopy and space-based photometry with the Kepler Space Telescope. From the frequency of these oscillations we determine the mass of Aldebaran to be $1.16 \pm 0.07 \, M_\odot$, and note that this implies its planet will have been subject to insolation comparable to the Earth for some of the star's main sequence lifetime. Our approach to sparse, irregularly sampled time series astronomical observations has the potential to unlock asteroseismic measurements for thousands of stars in archival data, and push to lower-mass planets around red giant stars.