Abstract
The discovery of solar-like oscillations in the giant star ξ Hya (G7 III) was reported by Frandsen et al. (2002). Their frequency analysis was very limited due to alias problems in the data set (caused by single-site observations). The extent to which the aliasing affected their analysis was unclear due to the unknown damping time of the stellar oscillation modes. In this paper we describe a simulator created to generate time series of stochastically excited oscillations, which takes as input an arbitrary window function and includes both white and non-white noise. We also outline a new method to compare a large number of simulated time series with an observed time series to determine the damping time, amplitude, and limited information on the degree of the stochastically excited modes. For ξ Hya we find the most likely amplitude to be ∼ 2 m s−1, in good agreement with theory (Houdek and Gough, 2002), and the most likely damping time to be ∼ 2 days, which is much shorter than the theoretical value of 15–20 days calculated by Houdek and Gough (2002).
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Stello, D., Kjeldsen, H., Bedding, T.R. et al. Simulating stochastically excited oscillations: The mode lifetime of ξ Hya. Solar Physics 220, 207–228 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SOLA.0000031388.64723.93
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:SOLA.0000031388.64723.93