Meredith L. Rawls edited Introduction.tex  over 9 years ago

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Stars with convective outer layers potentially exhibit solar-like oscillations. These oscillations depend on the physical processes in their interiors. In particular, evolved red giants are increasingly easy to characterize through these pressure-mode oscillations \citep[for a review of this topic, see][]{cha13}. Compared to main-sequence stars, red giants oscillate with larger amplitudes and longer periods---several hours to days instead of minutes. Oscillations appear as spikes in the amplitude spectrum of a light curve that is sampled both frequently enough and for a sufficiently long duration. Given these two requirements, observations from the \emph{Kepler} space telescope taken every 29.4 minutes (long-cadence) over many 90-day quarters are ideal for asteroseismic studies of red giant stars.  % EBs are really awesome w/Kepler too  \emph{Kepler}'s primary science goal is to find Earth-like exoplanets orbiting sun-like stars \citep{bor10}. However, in addition to successes in planet-hunting and suitability for red giant asteroseismology, \emph{Kepler} is also well-suited incredibly useful  for studies of eclipsing binary stars. In fact, \emph{Kepler} has discovered numerous long-period eclipsing systems from consistent target monitoring over several years. Eclipsing binaries are extremely important tools for understanding fundamental stellar properties, and in turn for testing stellar evolutionary models or determining distances. When radial velocity curves exist for both stars in an eclipsing binary, along with a well-sampled light curve, a full orbital solution can be found. Accurate masses and radii are straightforward to derive from such a solution; indeed, Kepler's third law applied in this way is the \emph{only} direct method for measuring stellar masses. Taken together, red giants in eclipsing binaries (hereafter RG/EBs) that exhibit solar-like oscillations are an ideal testbed for asteroseismology. There are presently 15(?) known RG/EBs that show solar-like oscillations \citep{gau13,gau14}. All of these have orbital periods ranging from tens to hundreds of days, and are found in the \emph{Kepler} field of view.