What asteroseismology can do for exoplanets

¹ Stellar Astrophysics Centre, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 120, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
² Instituut voor Sterrenkunde, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Celestijnenlaan 200 B, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium
³ Department of Physics, and Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
⁴ Sydney Institute for Astronomy (SIfA), School of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
⁵ School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
⁶ Department of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94820, USA
⁷ NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA 94035, USA

^a e-mail: vincent@phys.au.dk

Published online: 23 September 2015

Abstract

We describe three useful applications of asteroseismology in the context of exoplanet science: (1) the detailed characterisation of exoplanet host stars; (2) the measurement of stellar inclinations; and (3) the determination of orbital eccentricity from transit duration making use of asteroseismic stellar densities. We do so using the example system Kepler-410 [1]. This is one of the brightest (V = 9.4) Kepler exoplanet host stars, containing a small (2.8 R_⊕) transiting planet in a long orbit (17.8 days), and one or more additional non-transiting planets as indicated by transit timing variations. The validation of Kepler-410 (KOI-42) was complicated due to the presence of a companion star, and the planetary nature of the system was confirmed after analyzing a Spitzer transit observation as well as ground-based follow-up observations.