Inversions of stellar structure from asteroseismic data

TL;DR

This paper reviews seismic inversion techniques adapted from helioseismology for analyzing stellar internal structures using asteroseismic data, highlighting recent results, limitations, and future prospects with upcoming space missions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of seismic inversion methods applied to asteroseismology, including recent results and future developments for stellar structure analysis.

Findings

Successful application of inversion techniques to Kepler data

Identification of limitations in current seismic analysis methods

Future prospects with TESS and PLATO missions

Abstract

The advent of space-based photometry missions in the early 21st century enabled the application to asteroseismic data of advanced inference techniques until then restricted to the field of helioseismology. The high quality of the observations, the discovery of mixed modes in evolved solar-like oscillators and the need for an improvement in the determination of stellar fundamental parameters such as mass, radius and age led to the development of sophisticated modelling tools, amongst which seismic inversions play a key role. In this review, we will discuss the existing inversion techniques for the internal structure of distant stars adapted from helio- to asteroseismology. We will present results obtained for various Kepler targets, their coupling to other existing modelling techniques as well as the limitations of seismic analyses and the perspectives for future developments of these approaches in the context of the current TESS and the future PLATO mission, as well as the exploitation of the mixed modes observed in post-main sequence solar-like oscillators, for which variational formulations might not provide sufficient accuracy.