Particle Physics Division

In asteroseismology, the observed time series often suffers from incomplete time coverage due to repeated gaps. The presence of periodic gaps may generate spurious peaks in the power spectrum that limit the analysis of the data. Various methods have been developed to deal with gaps in time series data. We propose a new approach to handle the problem, the so-called inpainting method. This technique, based on a sparsity prior, enables to judiciously fill-in the gaps in the data, preserving the asteroseismic signal, as far as possible. This method can be applied both on ground and space-based data. It appears that the inpainting technique improves the oscillation modes detection and estimation. The impact of the observational window function is reduced and the interpretation of the power spectrum is simplified. Additionally, it can be used to study very long time series of many stars because its computation is very fast.

System Requirements: The binaries C++ called by IDL routines are not available for all the systems. The supported platforms are: Linux and Mac OS X. Before to run run_mca1d.pro, run init_var.pro to initialize the C++ environment variable.

Software Requirements: The IDL Inpainting software requires that IDL (version 6.0 or later) to be installed on your computer with the IDL Astronomy Library.

Download the K-Inpainting software