Towards a systematic treatment of observational uncertainties in forward asteroseismic modelling of gravity-mode pulsators

TL;DR

This study assesses how observational uncertainties in frequency extraction and pattern building affect the accuracy of asteroseismic models of gravity-mode pulsators, emphasizing the need to incorporate these uncertainties for reliable stellar parameter estimation.

Contribution

It systematically quantifies the impact of observational uncertainties on forward asteroseismic modelling of main sequence stars with gravity modes, highlighting the importance of including these in analysis.

Findings

Uncertainties in period spacing pattern construction can cause up to 10% differences in stellar mass and age.

Manual mode frequency selection significantly influences model parameters.

Propagation of observational errors affects the precision of asteroseismic inferences.

Abstract

Context. In asteroseismology the pulsation mode frequencies of a star are the fundamental data that are compared to theoretical predictions to determine a star's interior physics. Recent significant advances in the numerical, theoretical and statistical asteroseismic methods applied to main sequence stars with convective cores have renewed the interest in investigating the propagation of observational uncertainties within a forward asteroseismic modelling framework. Aims. We aim to quantify the impact of various choices made throughout the observational aspects of extracting pulsation mode frequencies in main sequence stars with gravity modes. Methods. We use a well-studied benchmark slowly pulsating B star, KIC 7760680, to investigate the sensitivity of forward asteroseismic modelling to various sources of observational uncertainty that affect the precision of the input pulsation mode frequencies. Results. We quantify the impact of the propagation of the observational uncertainties involved in forward asteroseismic modelling. We find that one of the largest sources of uncertainty in our benchmark star is in the manual building of period spacing patterns, such that the inclusion of a potentially ambiguous pulsation mode frequency may yield differences in model parameters of up to 10% for mass and age depending on the radial order of the mode. Conclusions. We conclude that future asteroseismic studies of main sequence stars with a convective core should quantify and include observational uncertainties introduced by the light curve extraction, iterative pre-whitening and the building of period spacing patterns, as these propagate into the final modelling results.