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Astroconformer: Inferring Surface Gravity of Stars from Stellar Light Curves with Transformer

2022/07/06 by Jiashu Pan, Yuan-Sen Ting, Pan, Jiashu +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR) #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2207.02787

openalex publication_date 2022/07/06 · openalex created_date 2022/07/09 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We introduce Astroconformer, a Transformer-based model to analyze stellar light curves from the Kepler mission. We demonstrate that Astrconformer can robustly infer the stellar surface gravity as a supervised task. Importantly, as Transformer captures long-range information in the time series, it outperforms the state-of-the-art data-driven method in the field, and the critical role of self-attention is proved through ablation experiments. Furthermore, the attention map from Astroconformer exemplifies the long-range correlation information learned by the model, leading to a more interpretable deep learning approach for asteroseismology. Besides data from Kepler, we also show that the method can generalize to sparse cadence light curves from the Rubin Observatory, paving the way for the new era of asteroseismology, harnessing information from long-cadence ground-based observations.

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