2007/02/04 by Dennis Stello, D. Stello, H. Bruntt +28 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11585.x
published as Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.377:584-594,2007 · 12 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS
arxiv created 2007/02/04 · openalex publication_date 2007/04/05 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Measuring solar-like oscillations in an ensemble of stars in a cluster, holds promise for testing stellar structure and evolution more stringently than just fitting parameters to single field stars. The most-ambitious attempt to pursue these prospects was by Gilliland et al. who targeted 11 turn-off stars in the open cluster M67 (NGC 2682), but the oscillation amplitudes were too small (<20 μmag) to obtain unambiguous detections. Like Gilliland et al. we also aim at detecting solar-like oscillations in M67, but we target red giant stars with expected amplitudes in the range 50–500 μmag and periods of 1 to 8 h. We analyse our recently published photometry measurements, obtained during a six-week multisite campaign using nine telescopes around the world. The observations are compared with simulations and with estimated properties of the stellar oscillations. Noise levels in the Fourier spectra as low as 27 μmag are obtained for single sites, while the combined data reach 19 μmag, making this the best photometric time series of an ensemble of red giant stars. These data enable us to make the first test of the scaling relations (used to estimate frequency and amplitude) with an homogeneous ensemble of stars. The detected excess power is consistent with the expected signal from stellar oscillations, both in terms of its frequency range and amplitude. However, our results are limited by apparent high levels of non-white noise, which cannot be clearly separated from the stellar signal.