FliPer: checking the reliability of global seismic parameters from automatic pipelines

Abstract

Our understanding of stars through asteroseismic data analysis is limited by our ability to take advantage of the huge amount of observed stars provided by space missions such as CoRoT, \keplerp, \ktop, and soon TESS and PLATO. Global seismic pipelines provide global stellar parameters such as mass and radius using the mean seismic parameters, as well as the effective temperature. These pipelines are commonly used automatically on thousands of stars observed by K2 for 3 months (and soon TESS for at least ∼ 1 month). However, pipelines are not immune from misidentifying noise peaks and stellar oscillations. Therefore, new validation techniques are required to assess the quality of these results. We present a new metric called FliPer (Flicker in Power), which takes into account the average variability at all measured time scales. The proper calibration of \powvar enables us to obtain good estimations of global stellar parameters such as surface gravity that are robust against the influence of noise peaks and hence are an excellent way to find faults in asteroseismic pipelines.