We describe a novel method for determining the demographics of a population of star clusters, for example distributions of cluster mass and age, from unresolved photometry. This method has a number of desirable properties: it fully exploits all the information available in a data set without any binning, correctly accounts for both measurement error and sample incompleteness, naturally handles heterogenous data (e.g. fields that have been imaged with different sets of filters or to different depths), marginalizes over uncertain extinctions, and returns the full posterior distributions of the parameters describing star cluster demographics. We demonstrate the method using mock star cluster catalogues and show that our method is robust and accurate, and that it can recover the demographics of star cluster populations significantly better than traditional fitting methods. For realistic sample sizes, our method is sufficiently powerful that its accuracy is ultimately limited by the accuracy of the underlying physical models for stellar evolution and interstellar dust, rather than by statistical uncertainties. Our method is implemented as part of the Stochastically Lighting Up Galaxies (SLUG) stellar populations code, and is freely available

Krumholz, M., Adamo, A., Fumagalli, M., Calzetti, D. (2019). SLUG IV: A novel forward-modelling method to derive the demographics of star clusters. MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, 482(3), 3550-3566 [10.1093/mnras/sty2896].

SLUG IV: A novel forward-modelling method to derive the demographics of star clusters

Fumagalli M.;
2019

Abstract

We describe a novel method for determining the demographics of a population of star clusters, for example distributions of cluster mass and age, from unresolved photometry. This method has a number of desirable properties: it fully exploits all the information available in a data set without any binning, correctly accounts for both measurement error and sample incompleteness, naturally handles heterogenous data (e.g. fields that have been imaged with different sets of filters or to different depths), marginalizes over uncertain extinctions, and returns the full posterior distributions of the parameters describing star cluster demographics. We demonstrate the method using mock star cluster catalogues and show that our method is robust and accurate, and that it can recover the demographics of star cluster populations significantly better than traditional fitting methods. For realistic sample sizes, our method is sufficiently powerful that its accuracy is ultimately limited by the accuracy of the underlying physical models for stellar evolution and interstellar dust, rather than by statistical uncertainties. Our method is implemented as part of the Stochastically Lighting Up Galaxies (SLUG) stellar populations code, and is freely available
Articolo in rivista - Articolo scientifico
Galaxies: star clusters: general; Methods: data analysis; Methods: statistical; Techniques: photometric
English
2019
482
3
3550
3566
open
Krumholz, M., Adamo, A., Fumagalli, M., Calzetti, D. (2019). SLUG IV: A novel forward-modelling method to derive the demographics of star clusters. MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY, 482(3), 3550-3566 [10.1093/mnras/sty2896].
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/10281/258713
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