Sherpa: a mission-independent data analysis application

By P. Freeman, S. Doe, Aneta Siemiginowska. SPIE Optics + Photonics, 2001

417 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The ever-increasing quality and complexity of astronomical data underscores the need for new and powerful data analysis applications. This need has led to the development of Sherpa, a modeling and fitting program in the CIAO software package that enables the analysis of multi-dimensional, multi-wavelength data. In this paper, we present an overview of Sherpa's features, which include: support for a wide variety of input and output data formats, including the new Model Descriptor List (MDL) format; a model language which permits the construction of arbitrarily complex model expressions, including ones representing instrument characteristics; a wide variety of fit statistics and methods of optimization, model comparison, and parameter estimation; multi-dimensional visualization, provided by ChIPS; and new interactive analysis capabilities provided by embedding the S-Lang interpreted scripting language. We conclude by showing example Sherpa analysis sessions.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f39dd42e2ea3ba61795ee6b9583016e5c93a418

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. N. Smith
2. A. Filippenko
3. J. Silverman
4. Ryan Chornock
5. Weidong Li
6. J. C. Wheeler
7. S. Smartt
8. W. N. Brandt

In Instrumentation

1. N. Smith
2. J. Silverman
3. A. Filippenko
4. Weidong Li
5. M. Boquien
6. Ryan Chornock
7. R. Foley
8. Dimitrios Psaltis

Citations in the corpus

• SN 2006gy: Discovery of the Most Luminous Supernova Ever Recorded, Powered by the Death of an Extremely Massive Star like η Carinae (2006, methodology): “We fit this model to the observed 0.5–8 keV spectrum in Sherpa (Freeman et al. 2001) using the statistic of Cash (1979).”
• Chandra and Spitzer Unveil Heavily Obscured Quasars in the Chandra/SWIRE Survey (2006, methodology): “In order to derive the corresponding absorption, Sherpa (Freeman et al. 2001) simulations were performed for each source assuming an absorbed power-law model.”
• Toward a Self-Consistent Model of the Ionized Absorber in NGC 3783 (2003, methodology): “We performed spectral fitting of the NGC 3783 data using PHASE integrated into the Sherpa (Freeman et al. 2001) package in CIAO (Fruscione2002) as a table model.”
• THE DENSE MATTER EQUATION OF STATE FROM NEUTRON STAR RADIUS AND MASS MEASUREMENTS (2015, methodology): “Following the analysis detailed in Güver et al. (2010), we fit the Mg and Ne edges using the MEG +/- 1st order data using Sherpa software (Freeman et al. 2001; Doe et al. 2007).”
• THE CHANDRA SOURCE CATALOG (2009, methodology): “Forward fitting is performed using the Sherpa fitting engine (Freeman et al. 2001; Doe et al. 2007).”
• x-cigale: fitting AGN/galaxy SEDs from X-ray to infrared (2020, methodology): “This is because the latter has already been well realized by many specialized X-ray codes such as XSPEC (Arnaud 1996) and Sherpa (Freeman et al. 2001), and there is no need for X-CIGALE to perform similar analyses.”