Precision spectrophotometry at the level of 0.1% Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Yan R.
  2. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

Accurate relative spectrophotometry is critical for many science applications. Small wavelength-scale residuals in the flux calibration can significantly impact the measurements of weak emission and absorption features in the spectra. Using Sloan Digital Sky Survey data, we demonstrate that the average spectra of carefully selected red-sequence galaxies can be used as a spectroscopic standard to improve the relative spectrophotometry precision to 0.1% on small wavelength scales (from a few to hundreds of Angstroms). We achieve this precision by comparing stacked spectra across tiny redshift intervals. The redshift intervals must be small enough that any systematic stellar population evolution is minimized and is less than the spectrophotometric uncertainty. This purely empirical technique does not require any theoretical knowledge of true galaxy spectra. It can be applied to all large spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys that sample a large number of galaxies in a uniform population.

Keywords
  1. spectrophotometry
  2. galaxies
  3. spectroscopy
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2011AJ....142..153Y
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/142/153
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/142/153
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.51420153

Access

IVOA Table Access TAP
https://tapvizier.cds.unistra.fr/TAPVizieR/tap
Run SQL-like queries with TAP-enabled clients (e.g., TOPCAT).

History

2013-03-12T15:15:08Z
Resource record created
2013-03-12T15:15:08Z
Created
2017-06-27T06:38:15Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr