A New Window to Tidal Asteroseismology: Non-linearly Excited Stellar Eigenmodes and the Period Spacing Pattern in KOI-54

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that non-linearly excited tidal oscillations in KOI-54 are actually stellar eigenmodes, enabling a new approach to tidal asteroseismology by identifying period spacing patterns in the Fourier spectrum.

Contribution

It reveals that non-linearly excited TEOs are eigenmodes and identifies a period spacing pattern, opening a new window for tidal asteroseismology.

Findings

Detected a clear period spacing pattern of quadrupole gravity modes.

The observed period spacing matches stellar models with measured parameters.

Largest-amplitude TEOs are near resonance and likely originate from different stars.

Abstract

We revisit the Tidally Excited Oscillations (TEOs) in the A-type, main-sequence, eccentric binary KOI-54, the prototype of heartbeat stars. Although the linear tidal response of the star is a series of orbital-harmonic frequencies which are not stellar eigenfrequencies, we show that the non-linearly excited non-orbital-harmonic TEOs are eigenmodes. By carefully choosing the modes which satisfy the mode-coupling selection rules, a period spacing ($\Delta P$) pattern of quadrupole gravity modes ($\Delta P \approx 2520-2535$ sec) can be discerned in the Fourier spectrum, with a detection significance level of $99.9\%$. The inferred period spacing value agrees remarkably well with the theoretical $l=2,m=0$ g modes from a stellar model with the measured mass, radius and effective temperature. We also find that the two largest-amplitude TEOs at $N=90, 91$ harmonics are very close to resonance with $l=2,m=0$ eigenmodes, and likely come from different stars. Previous works on tidal oscillations primarily focus on the modeling of TEO amplitudes and phases, the high sensitivity of TEO amplitude to the frequency detuning (tidal forcing frequency minus the closest stellar eigenfrequency) requires extremely dense grids of stellar models and prevents us from constraining the stellar physical parameters easily. This work, however, opens the window of real tidal asteroseismology by using the eigenfrequencies of the star inferred from the non-linear TEOs and possibly very-close-to-resonance linear TEOs. Our seismic modeling of these identified eigen g-modes shows that the best-matching stellar models have ($M \approx 2.20, 2.35 M_{\odot}$) and super-solar metallicity, in good agreement with previous measurements.