Asteroseismology of 16,000 Kepler Red Giants: Global Oscillation Parameters, Masses, and Radii

TLDR: In this article, the authors systematically characterize solar-like oscillations and granulation for 16,094 oscillating red giants, using end-of-mission long-cadence data.

Abstract: The Kepler mission has provided exquisite data to perform an ensemble asteroseismic analysis on evolved stars. In this work we systematically characterize solar-like oscillations and granulation for 16,094 oscillating red giants, using end-of-mission long-cadence data. We produced a homogeneous catalog of the frequency of maximum power (typical uncertainty $\\sigma_{\\nu_{\\rm max}}$=1.6\\%), the mean large frequency separation ($\\sigma_{\\Delta\\nu}$=0.6\\%), oscillation amplitude ($\\sigma_{\\rm A}$=4.7\\%), granulation power ($\\sigma_{\\rm gran}$=8.6\\%), power excess width ($\\sigma_{\\rm width}$=8.8\\%), seismically-derived stellar mass ($\\sigma_{\\rm M}$=7.8\\%), radius ($\\sigma_{\\rm R}$=2.9\\%), and thus surface gravity ($\\sigma_{\\log g}$=0.01 dex). Thanks to the large red giant sample, we confirm that red-giant-branch (RGB) and helium-core-burning (HeB) stars collectively differ in the distribution of oscillation amplitude, granulation power, and width of power excess, which is mainly due to the mass difference. The distribution of oscillation amplitudes shows an extremely sharp upper edge at fixed $\\nu_{\\rm max}$, which might hold clues to understand the excitation and damping mechanisms of the oscillation modes. We find both oscillation amplitude and granulation power depend on metallicity, causing a spread of 15\\% in oscillation amplitudes and a spread of 25\\% in granulation power from [Fe/H]=-0.7 to 0.5 dex. Our asteroseismic stellar properties can be used as reliable distance indicators and age proxies for mapping and dating galactic stellar populations observed by Kepler. They will also provide an excellent opportunity to test asteroseismology using Gaia parallaxes, and lift degeneracies in deriving atmospheric parameters in large spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE and LAMOST.