A Stellar Model-fitting Pipeline for Asteroseismic Data from the Kepler Mission

Over the past two decades, helioseismology has revolutionized our understanding of the interior structure and dynamics of the Sun. Asteroseismology will soon place this knowledge into a broader context by providing structural data for hundreds of Sun-like stars. Solar-like oscillations have already been detected from the ground in several stars, and NASA's Kepler mission is poised to unleash a flood of stellar pulsation data. Deriving reliable asteroseismic information from these observations demands a significant improvement in our analysis methods. In this paper we report the initial results of our efforts to develop an objective stellar model-fitting pipeline for asteroseismic data. The cornerstone of our automated approach is an optimization method using a parallel genetic algorithm. We describe the details of the pipeline and we present the initial application to Sun-as-a-star data, yielding an optimal model that accurately reproduces the known solar properties.