• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Spectrophotometric Parallaxes with Linear Models: Accurate Distances for Luminous Red-giant Stars
  • Contributor: Hogg, David W.; Eilers, Anna-Christina; Rix, Hans-Walter
  • Published: American Astronomical Society, 2019
  • Published in: The Astronomical Journal, 158 (2019) 4, Seite 147
  • Language: Not determined
  • DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/ab398c
  • ISSN: 0004-6256; 1538-3881
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: <jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>With contemporary infrared spectroscopic surveys like <jats:italic>APO Galactic Evolution Experiment</jats:italic> <jats:italic> </jats:italic>(<jats:italic>APOGEE</jats:italic>), red-giant stars can be observed to distances and extinctions at which <jats:italic>Gaia</jats:italic> parallaxes are not highly informative. Yet the combination of effective temperature, surface gravity, composition, and age—all accessible through spectroscopy—determines a giant’s luminosity. Therefore spectroscopy plus photometry should enable precise spectrophotometric distance estimates. Here we use the overlap of <jats:italic>APOGEE, Gaia</jats:italic>, the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the and <jats:italic>Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer</jats:italic> (<jats:italic>WISE</jats:italic>) to train a data-driven model to predict parallaxes for red-giant branch stars with <jats:inline-formula> <jats:tex-math> <?CDATA $0\lt \mathrm{log}g\leqslant 2.2$?> </jats:tex-math> <jats:inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="ajab398cieqn1.gif" xlink:type="simple" /> </jats:inline-formula> (more luminous than the red clump). We employ (the exponentiation of) a linear function of <jats:italic>APOGEE</jats:italic> spectral pixel intensities and multiband photometry to predict parallax spectrophotometrically. The model training involves no logarithms or inverses of the <jats:italic>Gaia</jats:italic> parallaxes, and needs no cut on the <jats:italic>Gaia</jats:italic> parallax signal-to-noise ratio. It includes an L1 regularization to zero out the contributions of uninformative pixels. The training is performed with leave-out subsamples such that no star’s astrometry is used even indirectly in its spectrophotometric parallax estimate. The model implicitly performs a reddening and extinction correction in its parallax prediction, without any explicit dust model. We assign to each star in the sample a new spectrophotometric parallax estimate; these parallaxes have uncertainties of less than 15%, depending on data quality, which is more precise than the <jats:italic>Gaia</jats:italic> parallax for the vast majority of targets, and certainly any stars more than a few kiloparsec distance. We obtain 10% distance estimates out to heliocentric distances of 20 kpc, and make global maps of the Milky Way’s disk.</jats:p>
  • Access State: Open Access