Near-critical magnetic fields in Kepler red giants

¹ IRAP, Université de Toulouse, CNRS, CNES, UPS, 31400 Toulouse, France
² Institut Universitaire de France (IUF), 1 rue Descartes, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France
³ Centre for Astrophysics, University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD 4350, Australia

^★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Received: 5 February 2026
Accepted: 10 April 2026

Abstract

Context. The recent seismic detection of magnetic fields in the cores of red giants has provided the opportunity to characterize these fields, potentially allowing access to information about their origin and their role in the internal transport of angular momentum.

Aims. We detected strong deviations from the regular pattern of g-mode periods in eight Kepler red giants showing l = 1 doublets. In three of these stars, the modes show partial suppression. We investigated the magnetic origin of these features and determined the characteristics of the core fields that can produce such signatures (strength, topology).

Methods. We needed to invoke strong near-critical fields. Assessing the effects of such fields on the mixed mode frequencies requires a non-perturbative approach. We used and adapted a formalism that was recently proposed following a similar development as the traditional approximation for rotation. We then computed asymptotic expressions of mixed mode frequencies including magnetic effects and attempted to reproduce the observed oscillation spectra.

Results. We show that for near-critical fields, information can be obtained about the radial profile of the radial field B_r, as opposed to weaker fields for which only a weighted average of B_r² can be measured. For the eight targets, we found that the l = 1 doublets cannot be identified as the m = ±1 components. Instead, we show that very good fits to all the observations can be obtained by identifying the two components as m = 0 and m = 1. These solutions correspond to fields with intensities ranging from 100 to 700 kG that are confined well below the H-burning shell. Our best-fit models for the eight stars have low masses (1.1–1.2 M_⊙), and the maximal size of their convective core during the main sequence approximately corresponds to the radial extent of the measured magnetic fields. The detected fields therefore could have been generated by dynamo action in the main-sequence convective core.