Automated preparation of Kepler time series of planet hosts for asteroseismic analysis

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 445; no. 3; pp. 2698 - 2709
• Main Authors: Handberg, R., Lund, M. N.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Oxford University Press 11-12-2014
• Subjects: Analysis; Automated; Extrasolar planets; Kepler mission (NASA); Observatories; Photometry; Planets; Production methods; Red giant stars; Space telescopes; Stars; Stars & galaxies; Tasks; Time series; methods: data analysis; stars: oscillations; planetary systems
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu1823

One of the tasks of the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Operations Center (KASOC) is to provide asteroseismic analyses on Kepler Objects of Interest. However, asteroseismic analysis of planetary host stars presents some unique complications with respect to data pre-processing, compared to pure asteroseismic targets. If not accounted for, the presence of planetary transits in the photometric time series often greatly complicates or even hinders these asteroseismic analyses. This drives the need for specialized methods of pre-processing data to make them suitable for asteroseismic analysis. In this paper, we present the KASOC filter, which is used to automatically prepare data from the Kepler/K2 mission for asteroseismic analyses of solar-like planet host stars. The methods are very effective at removing unwanted signals of both instrumental and planetary origins and produce significantly cleaner photometric time series than the original data. The methods are automated and can therefore easily be applied to a large number of stars. The application of the filter is not restricted to planetary hosts, but can be applied to any solar-like or red giant stars observed by Kepler/K2.