Parametric Recovery of Line‐of‐Sight Velocity Distributions from Absorption‐Line Spectra of Galaxies via Penalized Likelihood

2003/12/08 by Michele Cappellari, Eric Emsellem, Éric Emsellem · 2,263 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Vision and Imaging #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Computer science #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Galaxy #Geometry #Leaf Properties and Growth Measurement #Line (geometry) #Line-of-sight #Mathematics #Non-line-of-sight propagation #Parametric statistics #Physics #Spectral line #Spectrograph #Stars #Statistics #Stellar kinematics #Velocity dispersion #astro-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/381875

published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 116(816), 138-147 (Institute of Physics) · 7 pages, 7 figures, LaTeX (uses emulateapj). To appear in PASP, v.116, 2004 February. Software implementing the pPXF method described in this paper is available at http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~mcappell/idl/

arxiv created 2003/12/08 · openalex publication_date 2004/02/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We investigate the accuracy of the parametric recovery of the line‐of‐sight velocity distribution (LOSVD) of the stars in a galaxy while working in pixel space. Problems appear when the data have a low signal‐to‐noise ratio or the observed LOSVD is not well sampled by the data. We propose a simple solution based on maximum penalized likelihood, and we apply it to the common situation in which the LOSVD is described by a Gauss‐Hermite series. We compare different techniques by extracting the stellar kinematics from observations of the barred lenticular galaxy NGC 3384 obtained with the SAURON integral‐field spectrograph.

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