THE CANNON: A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO STELLAR LABEL DETERMINATION

By M. Ness, David W. Hogg, Hans-Walter Rix, A. Ho, G. Zasowski. 2015

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

New spectroscopic surveys offer the promise of stellar parameters and abundances (“stellar labels”) for hundreds of thousands of stars; this poses a formidable spectral modeling challenge. In many cases, there is a subset of reference objects for which the stellar labels are known with high(er) fidelity. We take advantage of this with The Cannon, a new data-driven approach for determining stellar labels from spectroscopic data. The Cannon learns from the “known” labels of reference stars how the continuum-normalized spectra depend on these labels by fitting a flexible model at each wavelength; then, The Cannon uses this model to derive labels for the remaining survey stars. We illustrate The Cannon by training the model on only 542 stars in 19 clusters as reference objects, with T eff ?> , log g ?> , and [ Fe / H ] ?> as the labels, and then applying it to the spectra of 55,000 stars from APOGEE DR10. The Cannon is very accurate. Its stellar labels compare well to the stars for which APOGEE pipeline (ASPCAP) labels are provided in DR10, with rms differences that are basically identical to the stated ASPCAP uncertainties. Beyond the reference labels, The Cannon makes no use of stellar models nor any line-list, but needs a set of reference objects that span label-space. The Cannon performs well at lower signal-to-noise, as it delivers comparably good labels even at one-ninth the APOGEE observing time. We discuss the limitations of The Cannon and its future potential, particularly, to bring different spectroscopic surveys onto a consistent scale of stellar labels.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9db1d715bcbff26cbc327ffc233862d5c403381e

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Citations in the corpus

The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, background): “But we are encouraged by the revolution that is now under way to improve the state of the art in achieving consistent stellar abundances ( Jofré et al. 2014, Ness et al. 2015).”
Confirming chemical clocks: asteroseismic age dissection of the Milky Way disc(s) (2017, methodology): “While methods like The Cannon are capable of extending the results of asteroseismology to stars that have no oscillations data, the precision in their derived ages is significantly lower (∼0.2 dex) than that obtained by asteroseismic analysis of red giants (e.g. Casagrande et al. 2016; Anders et al.”
A RADIAL AGE GRADIENT IN THE GEOMETRICALLY THICK DISK OF THE MILKY WAY (2016, methodology): “We repeat our analysis of RC stars using ages obtained by N16 via The Cannon (see top panel of Figure 3).”
The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, methodology): “Figure 11 shows the results of 20% leave-out cross-validation tests demonstrating that The Cannon is well able to determine the stellar labels to high precision.”
Binary Companions of Evolved Stars in APOGEE DR14: Search Method and Catalog of ∼5000 Companions (2018, methodology): “Additionally, the APOGEE pipelines (García Pérez et al. 2016) and also The Cannon (Ness et al. 2015) produce detailed abundance estimates for RGBand RC stars.”
CHEMICAL TAGGING CAN WORK: IDENTIFICATION OF STELLAR PHASE-SPACE STRUCTURES PURELY BY CHEMICAL-ABUNDANCE SIMILARITY (2016, methodology): “However, our recent work (Ness et al. 2015) suggests that the data are precise enough: There is enough S/N at the relevant locations in spectrum space to deliver high-precision tags.”
The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release (2018, background): “We emphasise that we include more stars and labels than Ness et al. (2015) because our parameter space covers a much larger part of the HR-diagram than the RGB.”
StarHorse : a Bayesian tool for determining stellar masses, ages, distances, and extinctions for field stars (2017, methodology): “The catalogue7 contains 10680 stars with [Fe/H], [α/Fe], log g, and Teff measurements derived by the Cannon method (Ness et al. 2015).”
The Fifteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release of MaNGA-derived Quantities, Data Visualization Tools, and Stellar Library (2018, result): “Holtzman et al. (2018) also discusses how results from The Cannon (Ness et al. 2015) are included in DR14 and compares those with the values from ASPCAP.”
Red giant masses and ages derived from carbon and nitrogen abundances (2015, unknown): “Arelated approach to calibrate masses and ages for giants using seismic data is presented in Ness et al. (2015).”
Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, methodology): “Stellar parameters and abundances for this sample (originally from APOGEE DR12, Alam et al. 2015) were re-derived using The Cannon (Ness et al. 2015).”
Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA): Pulsating Variable Stars, Rotation, Convective Boundaries, and Energy Conservation (2019, background): “…explosion of activity in stellar astrophysics, community-driven software instruments are transforming how stellar theory, modeling, and simulations interact with observations (e.g., Turk et al. 2011; Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013; Ness et al. 2015; Choi et al. 2016; Astropy Collaboration et al. 2018).”