Benchmarking the spectroscopic masses of 249 evolved stars using asteroseismology with TESS

TL;DR

This study uses TESS asteroseismology to measure stellar masses of 249 evolved stars, addressing the controversy over spectroscopic mass estimates, and finds a mass-dependent offset that does not significantly impact planet occurrence correlations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive comparison of asteroseismic and spectroscopic masses for a large sample of evolved stars, expanding previous studies and clarifying mass measurement discrepancies.

Findings

Mass offset between spectroscopy and seismology increases with stellar mass.

Adopting seismic masses does not significantly alter planet occurrence correlations.

Seismic measurements for 157 additional giants are reported.

Abstract

One way to understand planet formation is through studying the correlations between planet occurrence rates and stellar mass. However, measuring stellar mass in the red giant regime is very difficult. In particular, the spectroscopic masses of certain evolved stars, often referred to as "retired A-stars", have been questioned in the literature. Efforts to resolve this mass controversy using spectroscopy, interferometry and asteroseismology have so far been inconclusive. A recent ensemble study found a mass-dependent mass offset, but the result was based on only 16 stars. With NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), we expand the investigation of the mass discrepancy to a total of 92 low-luminosity stars, synonymous with the retired A-stars. We measure their characteristic oscillation frequency, $\mathrm{\nu}_{\mathrm{max}}$, and the large frequency separation, $\mathrm{\Delta\nu}$, from their TESS photometric time series. Using these measurements and asteroseismic scaling relations, we derive asteroseismic masses and compare them with spectroscopic masses from five surveys, to comprehensively study the alleged mass-dependent mass offset. We find a mass offset between spectroscopy and seismology that increases with stellar mass. However, we note that adopting the seismic mass scale does not have a significant effect on the planet occurrence-mass-metallicity correlation for the so-called retired A-stars. We also report seismic measurements and masses for 157 higher luminosity giants (mostly helium-core-burning) from the spectroscopic surveys.