Recovering galaxy star formation and metallicity histories from spectra using VESPA

By R. Tojeiro, Alan Heavens, Raul Jimenez, B. Panter. 2007

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We introduce versatile spectral analysis (VESPA): a new method which aims to recover robust star formation and metallicity histories from galactic spectra. VESPA uses the full spectral range to construct a galaxy history from synthetic models. We investigate the use of an adaptative parametrization grid to recover reliable star formation histories on a galaxy-by-galaxy basis. Our goal is robustness as opposed to high-resolution histories, and the method is designed to return high time resolution only where the data demand it. In this paper we detail the method and we present our findings when we apply VESPA to synthetic and real Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic data. We show that the number of parameters that can be recovered from a spectrum depends strongly on the signal-to-noise ratio, wavelength coverage and presence or absence of a young population. For a typical SDSS sample of galaxies, we can normally recover between two and five stellar populations. We find very good agreement between VESPA and our previous analysis of the SDSS sample with MOPED.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68b9e62ec4172c5198ba23f6ea43cbad1f43c7bf

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Citations in the corpus

A census of metals and baryons in stars in the local universe (2007, methodology): “…extended to the SDSS DR3 (three times larger sample) by Panter et al. (2007), with improvements both in the data and in the modelling sides (see also Ocvirk et al. 2006; Cid Fernandes et al. 2007; Tojeiro et al. 2007 for similar methods to recover stellar content and SFHs from galaxy spectra).”
Modeling the Panchromatic Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies (2013, methodology): “Tojeiro et al. (2009) compared SFRs estimated with VESPA to emission line-based SFRs from Brinchmann et al. (2004).”
Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies (2010, methodology): “Dust attenuation and varying metallicity are explored by repeating the fit with VESPA over a grid of parameters.”
Post-starburst galaxies: more than just an interesting curiosity (2008, background): “At low redshift, the quality of spectra and models now allow the analysis of large spectral regions (Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Tojeiro et al. 2007; Wild et al. 2007; Koleva et al. 2008).”
Galaxy Masses: A Review (2013, background): “The optimum amount of reduction allowed while retaining all information available will depend on the data quality and model used and may be hard to determine (Tojeiro et al. 2007; Graff et al. 2011).”
The delay-time distribution of Type Ia supernovae from Sloan II (2012, methodology): “Tojeiro et al. (2009) performed spectral synthesis modelling of all galaxy spectra in the SDSS using their VESPA code (Tojeiro et al. 2007).”
The star formation history of CALIFA galaxies: Radial structures (2013, background): “…focus on spectral indices like equivalent widths and/or colors (Bica 1988; Proctor et al. 2004 ; Gallazzi et al. 2005, 2006), and those which use the whole spectrum (Heavens et al. 2004; Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2006; Koleva et al. 2009 ; Tojeiro et al. 2007; MacArthur et al. 2009).”
THE STAR FORMATION HISTORIES OF LOCAL GROUP DWARF GALAXIES. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE FIELD PLANETARY CAMERA 2 OBSERVATIONS (2014, background): “As explained in Conroy (2013), while there has been extensive testing of spectra based SFH determinations (e.g, Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Tojeiro et al. 2007), these tests have primarily focused on internal diagnostics (e.g., self-consistency between star-forming and quiescent galaxies,…”
Nearby supernova rates from the Lick Observatory Supernova Search - IV. A recovery method for the delay-time distribution (2010, methodology): “Tojeiro et al. (2009) performed spectral synthesis modeling of all galaxy spectra in the SDSS using their VESPA code (Tojeiro et al. 2007).”
ULySS: a full spectrum fitting package (2009, methodology): “TheULySSpackage can be used to reconstruct a detailed SFH, in practice limited to 2 to 4 epochs of star formation (see also VESPA;Tojeiro et al. 2007). irect solution with a 2-SSP models.”
Erratum: Recovering galaxy stellar population properties from broad-band spectral energy distribution fitting (2012, methodology): “…in which population parameters are extracted by fitting the full available spectrum (Heavens et al. 2000; Cid Fernandes et al. 2004; Ocvirk et al. 2006; Panter et al. 2007; Tojeiro et al. 2007, 2009; Chen et al. 2012) and which also requires high quality and high S/N spectra in order to succeed.”
An Older, More Quiescent Universe from Panchromatic SED Fitting of the 3D-HST Survey (2018, methodology): “In brief, this prior weights against sharp transitions in SFR(t), similar to the regularization schemes from Ocvirk et al. (2006) and Tojeiro et al. (2007).”
Stellar population gradients in galaxy discs from the CALIFA survey - The influence of bars (2014, methodology): “…history with time using as much information as possible from the spectra (Heavens et al. 2000; Panter et al. 2003; Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2006a,b; Tojeiro et al. 2007; Koleva et al. 2009 – see, e.g., Walcher et al. 2011; Sánchez et al. 2012a,b; Rosales-Ortega et al. 2012).”
Structure and Kinematics of Early-Type Galaxies from Integral Field Spectroscopy (2016, methodology): “…2011; Conroy & van Dokkum 2012a), the studies of the stellar population from integralfield data has moved to the full-spectrum fitting approach (using fitting codes like ppxf Cappellari & Emsellem 2004; starlight Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; steckmap Ocvirk et al. 2006; vespa Tojeiro et al. 2007).”
Improving the full spectrum fitting method: accurate convolution with Gauss-Hermite functions (2016, background): “…of modelling its unobscured rest-frame spectrum by discretizing the following integral equation (e.g. Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2006; Tojeiro et al. 2007) Gmod(λ) = ∫ t=T t=0 SSPλ(t,Z) · SFR(T − t) dt, (24) where SFR is the star formation rate, SSPλ is a Single Stellar Population…”
OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY AND NEBULAR OXYGEN ABUNDANCES OF THE SPITZER/SINGS GALAXIES (2010, background): “…ill suited for solving this kind of problem, although more general methods for inferring these quantities from integrated optical spectra have been developed (e.g., Panter et al. 2003; Gallazzi et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2006; Cid Fernandes et al. 2007; Tojeiro et al. 2007; Blanton & Roweis 2007).”
Age-dating luminous red galaxies observed with the Southern African Large Telescope (2016, methodology): “…to data: (i) full–spectrum fitting (e.g. Heavens, Jimenez, & Lahav 2000; Cid Fernandes et al. 2005; Ocvirk et al. 2006a,b; Chilingarian et al. 2007; Tojeiro et al. 2007; Koleva et al. 2009a) and (ii) techniques that fit features in the spectra such as Lick– index fitting (e.g. Worthey & Ottaviani…”
Cosmology and Fundamental Physics with the Euclid Satellite (2012, background): “The last of these can be probed using the integrated stellar spectra of the galaxies, using a code such as vespa [1162], and this is evidently dependent only on atomic and nuclear physics, independent of homogeneity.”