Asteroseismic Red Giant Yield for TESS

These slides show an estimated yield for asteroseismic detections in red giant stars by the TESS Mission. The left-hand panels show power spectra (ppm² muHz^-1 versus muHz) for three red giants in different evolutionary stages using 4 years of long-cadence data from the Kepler Mission. Numbers indicate the approximate number of Kepler detections with nu_max between 5-10 muHz, 10-50 muHz, and 50-150 muHz. The right-hand panels show the same data with the expected TESS photometric precision for I=10 mag from Sullivan et al. (2015), with numbers indicating the expected number of stars with I<10 mag in the same nu_max intervals from an all-sky synthetic population generated using Galaxia (Sharma et al. 2011). Consecutive slides show simulated TESS datasets of different lengths depending on ecliptic latitude: |b| > 78 degrees (ecliptic poles, 1 year coverage), |b| > 60 degrees (~54 day coverage), and |b| > 6 degrees (~27 days coverage). Estimated yields are only given for dataset length and evolutionary state combinations for which a measurement of Delta_nu and nu_max can be expected. Assuming that TESS will detect oscillations in stars with numax ~ 10-50 muHz down to I~10 mag, the expected asteroseismic red giant yield of TESS is ~> 3.5 x 10^5 stars.

Calculations and slides are based on a colloquium presentation at MIT on March 3 2015.