On fitting the full spectrum of luminous red galaxies by using ULySS and STARLIGHT

Abstract

We select a sample of quiescent luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 with a high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) to study the consistency of fitting the full spectrum by using different packages, mainly, ULySS and STARLIGHT. The spectrum of each galaxy in the sample is fitted by the full spectrum fitting packages ULySS and STARLIGHT. We find: (1) for spectra with higher S/Ns, the ages of stellar populations obtained from ULySS are slightly older than those from STARLIGHT, and metallicities derived from ULySS are slightly richer than those from STARLIGHT. In general, both packages can give roughly consistent fitting results. (2) For low S/N spectra, it is possible that the fitting by ULySS can become trapped at some local minimum in the parameter space during execution and thus may give unreliable results, but STARLIGHT can still give reliable results. Based on the fitting results of LRGs, we further analyze their star formation history and the relation between their age and velocity dispersion, and find that they agree well with conclusions from previous works. © 2013 National Astronomical Observatories of Chinese Academy of Sciences and IOP Publishing Ltd..