Fitting the integrated spectral energy distributions of galaxies

By J. Walcher, B. Groves, Tamás Budavári, D. Dale. 2010

278 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fitting the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of galaxies is an almost universally used technique that has matured significantly in the last decade. Model predictions and fitting procedures have improved significantly over this time, attempting to keep up with the vastly increased volume and quality of available data. We review here the field of SED fitting, describing the modelling of ultraviolet to infrared galaxy SEDs, the creation of multiwavelength data sets, and the methods used to fit model SEDs to observed galaxy data sets. We touch upon the achievements and challenges in the major ingredients of SED fitting, with a special emphasis on describing the interplay between the quality of the available data, the quality of the available models, and the best fitting technique to use in order to obtain a realistic measurement as well as realistic uncertainties. We conclude that SED fitting can be used effectively to derive a range of physical properties of galaxies, such as redshift, stellar masses, star formation rates, dust masses, and metallicities, with care taken not to over-interpret the available data. Yet there still exist many issues such as estimating the age of the oldest stars in a galaxy, finer details of dust properties and dust-star geometry, and the influences of poorly understood, luminous stellar types and phases. The challenge for the coming years will be to improve both the models and the observational data sets to resolve these uncertainties. The present review will be made available on an interactive, moderated web page (sedfitting.org), where the community can access and change the text. The intention is to expand the text and keep it up to date over the coming years.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc1c2ddaf89d49a714af41069ba8be3fe0dd119c

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Citations in the corpus

PRIMUS: CONSTRAINTS ON STAR FORMATION QUENCHING AND GALAXY MERGING, AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE STELLAR MASS FUNCTION FROM z = 0–1 (2013, methodology): “Given the limitations of these other techniques, iSEDfit extracts the physical parameters of interest using a simplified Bayesian approach (Walcher et al. 2011, and references therein).”
CALIFA : a diameter-selected sample for an integral field spectroscopy galaxy survey (2014, background): “Many assumptions and technical tricks go into these derivations (Walcher et al. 2011), and it is beyond the scope of this paper to describe in detail how these are addressed.”
Nebular Continuum and Line Emission in Stellar Population Synthesis Models (2016, methodology): “…models used to interpret galaxy observations account for the light emitted by stars and the reprocessing of that light by dust, but only a handful of current SPS codes include nebular emission, despite its important effects on the output spectrum (see reviews in Walcher et al. 2011; Conroy 2013).”
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).”
Modeling the Panchromatic Spectral Energy Distributions of Galaxies (2013, methodology): “The reader is referred to Walcher et al. (2011) for further details on SED fitting tech- niques.”
Mass-metallicity relation explored with CALIFA I. Is there a dependence on the star-formation rate? (2013, methodology): “However, it presents its own problems, in particlar the uncertainties in the M/L ratio related to the unknown contribution of the TP-AGB stars in this wavelength regime (e.g. Walcher et al. 2011).”
A CATALOG OF BULGE, DISK, AND TOTAL STELLAR MASS ESTIMATES FOR THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY (2013, background): “Conversely, for the minority population of bursty galaxies (<10%; Kauffmann et al. 2003b), we may overestimate stellar masses by a factor of two or more, and systematically underestimate their uncertainties (see also Walcher et al. 2011).”
A HIGHLY CONSISTENT FRAMEWORK FOR THE EVOLUTION OF THE STAR-FORMING “MAIN SEQUENCE” FROM z ∼ 0–6 (2014, background): “Based on previous results in the literature (discussed below), we do not choose to adjust our 9 For a more in-depth discussion of many of the points discussed below, see Bastian et al. (2010), Kroupa et al. (2013), KE12, Walcher et al. (2011), and Conroy (2013). results for differences in assumed st”
Erratum: Recovering galaxy stellar population properties from broad-band spectral energy distribution fitting (2012, methodology): “Galaxy properties are derived by fitting stellar population models to data, and several approaches are taken, which have pros and cons (for recent reviews see Walcher et al. 2011; Maraston 2011a).”
THE EMISSION BY DUST AND STARS OF NEARBY GALAXIES IN THE HERSCHEL KINGFISH SURVEY (2011, methodology): “…of different models have been applied to galaxy SEDs (e.g., Fioc & Rocca-Volmerange 1997; Silva et al. 1998; Devriendt et al. 1999; see review by Walcher et al. 2011), and there has been much recent work attempting to model both the stellar and dust SEDs of galaxies, over a wide range of…”
The star formation history of CALIFA galaxies: Radial structures (2013, background): “…combination of an initial mass function (IMF) with stellar isochrones and libraries that provide the spectra of stars with temperature, gravity and metallicity demanded by the evolutionary tracks (e.g., Tinsley 1980; Bruzual & Charlot 1993; Leitherer et al. 1999; Walcher et al. 2011; Conroy 2013).”