Aspects of observational red giant population seismology

Abstract

The space missions CoRoT and Kepler provide us with large samples of red giant stars wherein non-radial solar-like oscillations can be detected. This leads to the exciting opportunity to do population seismology. In this paper we give a short overview of some relevant technical aspects of the two satellites, we list and comment on some important target selection biases relevant for population seismology, and we make a case to use kernel density estimates as an alternative for histograms to characterize population characteristics