Assessing the Accuracy of TESS Asteroseismology with APOGEE

TL;DR

This study validates TESS asteroseismology against Kepler data, showing TESS's measurements are accurate within 5% for most red giants, enabling reliable galactic archaeology research.

Contribution

It demonstrates that TESS asteroseismic measurements are well-calibrated to the Kepler scale, confirming their reliability for large-scale stellar and galactic studies.

Findings

TESS seismic data is calibrated to Kepler scale within 5% for 90% of red giants.

TESS measurements show minimal bias with respect to stellar mass, metallicity, and surface gravity.

Current TESS asteroseismic results are suitable for galactic archaeology applications.

Abstract

The recent NASA TESS mission has the potential to increase the available asteroseismic sample dramatically, but its precision and accuracy have yet to be confirmed. To date, NASA's Kepler mission has been considered the gold standard for asteroseismic samples, despite data only being available for a small portion of the sky. TESS's observations cover the whole sky, and previous work has identified 158,000 potential red giant oscillators. Using APOGEE, which is calibrated to the asteroseismic scale of the Kepler data, we show that seismology from TESS is calibrated to the Kepler scale to better than 5% for about 90% of red giants, and has only slight trends with mass, metallicity, and surface gravity. We therefore conclude that current TESS seismic results can already be used for galactic archaeology, and future results are likely to be highly transformational to our understanding.