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We have detected solar-like oscillations in the mid-K-dwarf ϵ Indi A, making it the coolest dwarf to have measured oscillations. The star is noteworthy for harboring a pair of brown dwarf companions and a Jupiter-type planet. We observed ϵ Indi A during two radial velocity campaigns, using the high-resolution spectrographs HARPS (2011) and UVES (2021). Weighting the time series, we computed the power spectra and established the detection of solar-like oscillations with a power excess located at 5265 ± 110 μ Hz—the highest frequency solar-like oscillations so far measured in any star. The measurement of the center of the power excess allows us to compute a stellar mass of 0.782 ± 0.023 M ⊙ based on scaling relations and a known radius from interferometry. We also determine the amplitude of the peak power and note that there is a slight difference between the two observing campaigns, indicating a varying activity level. Overall, this work confirms that low-amplitude solar-like oscillations can be detected in mid-K-type stars in radial velocity measurements obtained with high-precision spectrographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have detected solar-like oscillations in the mid-K-dwarf ϵ Indi A, making it the coolest dwarf to have measured oscillations. The star is noteworthy for harboring a pair of brown dwarf companions and a Jupiter-type planet. We observed ϵ Indi A during two radial velocity campaigns, using the high-resolution spectrographs HARPS (2011) and UVES (2021). Weighting the time series, we computed the power spectra and established the detection of solar-like oscillations with a power excess located at 5265 ± 110 μ Hz—the highest frequency solar-like oscillations so far measured in any star. The measurement of the center of the power excess allows us to compute a stellar mass of 0.782 ± 0.023 M _⊙ based on scaling relations and a known radius from interferometry. We also determine the amplitude of the peak power and note that there is a slight difference between the two observing campaigns, indicating a varying activity level. Overall, this work confirms that low-amplitude solar-like oscillations can be detected in mid-K-type stars in radial velocity measurements obtained with high-precision spectrographs.

Asteroseismology of dwarf stars cooler than the Sun is very challenging owing to the low amplitudes and rapid timescales of oscillations. Here we present the asteroseismic detection of solar-like oscillations at 4-minute timescales ( ${\nu }_{\max }\sim 4300$ μ Hz) in the nearby K dwarf σ Draconis using extreme-precision Doppler velocity observations from the Keck Planet Finder and 20 s cadence photometry from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. The star is the coolest dwarf star to date with both velocity and luminosity observations of solar-like oscillations, having amplitudes of 5.9 ± 0.8 cm s ^−1 and 0.8 ± 0.2 ppm, respectively. These measured values are in excellent agreement with established luminosity−velocity amplitude relations for oscillations and provide further evidence that mode amplitudes for stars with T _eff < 5500 K diminish in scale following an ( L / M ) ^1.5 relation. By modeling the star’s oscillation frequencies from photometric data, we measure an asteroseismic age of 4.5 ± 0.9 (ran) ± 1.2 (sys) Gyr. The observations demonstrate the capability of next-generation spectrographs and precise space-based photometry to extend observational asteroseismology to nearby cool dwarfs, which are benchmarks for stellar astrophysics and prime targets for directly imaging planets using future space-based telescopes.