Asteroseismology and the Solar-Stellar Connection

In March 2009, NASA will launch the Kepler satellite—a mission designed to discover habitable Earth-like planets around distant Sun-like stars. The method that Kepler will use to detect distant worlds will only reveal the size of the planet relative to the size of the host star, so part of the mission is devoted to characterizing other suns using asteroseismology. In this proceedings, I give a broad overview of the Kepler mission and the data that it will produce, with a special emphasis on how it could improve our understanding of solar and stellar dynamos. I conclude with an update on the development of a stellar modeling pipeline for interpreting asteroseismic observations. 1. Song of the Stars In the region of Canada that is now Quebec and Ontario, a Native American tribe known as the Algonquin developed a detailed myth about the annual path of the Big Dipper around the north celestial pole, which they chanted in their “Song of the Stars”: We are the stars which sing, We sing with our light; We are the birds of fire, We fly over the sky. If we think of asteroseismology as the study of “stars which sing with their light”, then NASA’s Kepler mission is poised to record the largest stellar choir ever assembled. In this proceedings, I will give a brief overview of the Kepler mission, followed by a review of the specific types of data the satellite is likely to produce which have the potential to improve our understanding of solar and stellar dynamos. I will conclude with an update on the work I have been doing to prepare for the massive wave of data soon expected from Kepler. 2. Overview of the Kepler Mission If you visit NASA’s homepage for Kepler (http://kepler.nasa.gov/), the banner across the top of the page proclaims it to be “a search for habitable planets.” Indeed, the primary science goal of the Kepler mission is to find Earth-like planets with orbits inside the habitable zones of Sun-like stars. So why is asteroseismology a part of this mission at all? Well, Kepler aims to detect these habitable planets through high precision photometry of exoplanet transits. The small dip in the amount of light coming from the system is a measure of the