A non-parametric method of estimating the physical parameters of stellar atmosphere

Abstract

The physical parameters of stellar atmosphere, e.g. the effective temperature, surface gravity and chemical abundance, are the main factors for the differences in stellar spectra, and the automatic measurement of these parameters is an important content in the automatic processing of the immense amount of spectral data provided by LAMOST and other patrol telescopes. Aiming at the estimation of the physical parameters for every star in large samples of stellar spectral data, a variable window-width algorithm is proposed in this article. It consists of the following three steps: (1) A PCA (principal component analysis) treatment of historical stellar spectral data is carried out to obtain a low-dimensional characteristic data of the spectra. (2) Establish the correlation between the characteristic data and the physical parameters using a non-parametric estimator with variable window-width. (3) By means of this estimator, the three physical parameters of the star are directly calculated. As shown by results of experiments, in comparison with the fixed window-width estimator and other algorithms reported in literature, our algorithm is more accurate and robust. © 2006 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.