Spectroscopy Made Easy: Evolution

By N. Piskunov, J. Valenti. 2016

234 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Context. The Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME) package has become a popular tool for analyzing stellar spectra, often in connection with large surveys or exoplanet research. SME has evolved significantly since it was first described in 1996, but many of the original caveats and potholes still haunt users. The main drivers for this paper are complexity of the modeling task, the large user community, and the massive effort that has gone into SME. Aims. We do not intend to give a comprehensive introduction to stellar atmospheres, but will describe changes to key components of SME: the equation of state, opacities, and radiative transfer. We will describe the analysis and fitting procedure and investigate various error sources that affect inferred parameters. Methods. We review the current status of SME, emphasizing new algorithms and methods. We describe some best practices for using the package, based on lessons learned over two decades of SME usage. We present a new way to assess uncertainties in derived stellar parameters. Results. Improvements made to SME, better line data, and new model atmospheres yield more realistic stellar spectra, but in many cases systematic errors still dominate over measurement uncertainty. Future enhancements are outlined.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6174b1e74fcf5ba4ce943fd2fa4b43b36a99972

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. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
  2. Martin Asplund
  3. Y. Ting 丁
  4. D. Huber
  5. Jane Lin
  6. K. Lind
  7. D. Stello
  8. Luca Casagrande

In Instrumentation

  1. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
  2. Martin Asplund
  3. D. Huber
  4. M. Ness
  5. D. Stello
  6. K. Lind
  7. Y. Ting 丁
  8. Jane Lin

Citations in the corpus