Detecting Solar-Like Oscillations in the Highest Mass TESS Giants

Red-giant asteroseismology yields precise stellar parameters, making it a powerful tool for studying stellar structure and evolution, as demonstrated by the Kepler mission. However, due to Kepler's limited field of view, it primarily sampled the more populous low-mass red giants found outside of the Galactic plane, leading to limited detections of red giants above 3 M. Here we use the all-sky TESS data to isolate 227 intermediate-mass candidates from large catalogs with a pre-selection based on photometric and spectroscopic data. We optimize TESS light curves using a boutique light curve detrending method with custom apertures. Compared to the MIT Quick Look Pipeline, this yields a 12% average increase in the power-to-background ratio within the oscillation envelope, even in the heavily crowded Galactic plane. We detect solar-like oscillations in 98 targets, including 43 with M* > 3 M. Our sample also includes 10 stars having masses greater than 5, among the highest-mass solar-like oscillators detected to date. From our detections, we find that the APOGEE DR19 spectroscopic g is systematically larger by, on average, 0.23 dex compared to the seismic g. This offset is possibly due to the lack of intermediate-mass giants observed by Kepler, which was used to calibrate the spectroscopic g in the APOGEE pipeline. Extending the same pre-selection criteria to TESS targets with Gaia XP spectroscopic parameters identifies up to 37,000 candidate intermediate-mass solar-like oscillators for follow-up and population studies.