The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury XV. The BEAST: Bayesian Extinction and Stellar Tool

Abstract

We present the Bayesian Extinction And Stellar Tool (BEAST), a probabilistic approach to modeling the dust extinguished photometric spectral energy distribution of an individual star while accounting for observational uncertainties common to large resolved star surveys. Given a set of photometric measurements and an observational uncertainty model, the BEAST infers the physical properties of the stellar source using stellar evolution and atmosphere models and constrains the line of sight extinction using a newly developed mixture model that encompasses the full range of dust extinction curves seen in the Local Group. The BEAST is specifically formulated for use with large multi-band surveys of resolved stellar populations. Our approach accounts for measurement uncertainties and any covariance between them due to stellar crowding (both systematic biases and uncertainties in the bias) and absolute flux calibration, thereby incorporating the full information content of the measurement. We illustrate the accuracy and precision possible with the BEAST using data from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury. While the BEAST has been developed for this survey, it can be easily applied to similar existing and planned resolved star surveys.

20 pages, 19 figures, ApJ, in press

References in corpus (8)

• A Grid of NLTE Line-Blanketed Model Atmospheres of Early B-type Stars
• Improving PARSEC models for very low mass stars
• The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury
• New PARSEC evolutionary tracks of massive stars at low metallicity: testing canonical stellar evolution in nearby star forming dwarf galaxies
• The ACS Nearby Galaxy Survey Treasury IX. Constraining asymptotic giant branch evolution with old metal-poor galaxies
• The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury X. Ultraviolet to Infrared Photometry of 117 Million Equidistant Stars
• Techniques and Review of Absolute Flux Calibration from the Ultraviolet to the Mid-Infrared
• Herschel-Planck dust optical-depth and column-density maps: I. Method description and results for Orion

Cited by in corpus (43)

• One Relation for All Wavelengths: The Far-Ultraviolet to Mid-Infrared Milky Way Spectroscopic R(V) Dependent Dust Extinction Relationship
• Updated Constraints on Asteroid-Mass Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter
• Scientific Discovery with the James Webb Space Telescope
• The VMC survey - XXXI. The spatially resolved star formation history of the main body of the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Probing the Nature of High Redshift Weak Emission Line Quasars: A Young Quasar with a Starburst Host Galaxy
• METAL: The Metal Evolution, Transport, and Abundance in the Large Magellanic Cloud Hubble program. I. Overview and Initial Results
• Extinction Maps and Dust-to-Gas Ratios in Nearby Galaxies with LEGUS
• The Small Magellanic Cloud Investigation of Dust and Gas Evolution (SMIDGE): The Dust Extinction Curve from Red Clump Stars
• Mapping the Escape Fraction of Ionizing Photons Using Resolved Stars: A Much Higher Escape Fraction for NGC 4214
• Revised extinctions and radii for 1.5 million stars observed by APOGEE, GALAH, and RAVE
• A Differential Measurement of Circumstellar Extinction for AA Tau's 2011 Dimming Event
• Astrophysical Parameters from Gaia DR2, 2MASS & AllWISE
• Young Accreting Compact Objects in M31: The Combined Power of NuSTAR, Chandra, and Hubble
• Far-Ultraviolet Spectra of Main-Sequence O Stars at Extremely Low Metallicity
• Comparing Chandra and Hubble in the Northern Disk of M31
• Three-Dimensional Structure and Dust Extinction in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• An Empirical Calibration of the Tip of the Red Giant Branch Distance Method in the Near Infrared. I. HST WFC3/IR F110W and F160W Filters
• A Panchromatic Study of Massive Stars in the Extremely Metal-Poor Local Group Dwarf Galaxy Leo A
• Multiwavelength Characterization of the High Mass X-ray Binary Population of M31
• A Mote in Andromeda's Disk: a Misidentified Periodic AGN Behind M31
• Dust Attenuation Curves at z $\sim$ 0.8 from LEGA-C: Precise Constraints on the Slope and 2175$\mathring{A}$ Bump Strength
• Dust Extinction Law in Nearby Star-Resolved Galaxies. I. M31 Traced by Supergiants
• Evidence of dust grain evolution from extinction mapping in the IC 63 photodissociation region
• The Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury XVII. Examining Obscured Star Formation with Synthetic Ultraviolet Flux Maps in M31
• Identification of the Hard X-ray Source Dominating the E > 25 keV Emission of the Nearby Galaxy M31
• The missing FeII bump in faint JWST AGN: possible evidence for metal-poor broad-line regions at early cosmic times
• Quasars as standard candles VI: spectroscopic validation of the cosmological sample
• Multiwavelength Characterization of the High Mass X-ray Binary Population of M33
• Hubble Tarantula Treasury Project - VI. Identification of Pre-Main-Sequence Stars using Machine Learning techniques
• Measuring Resolved Star Formation Histories from High-Precision Color-Magnitude Diagrams with StarFormationHistories.jl
• Hawai'i Supernova Flows: A Peculiar Velocity Survey Using Over a Thousand Supernovae in the Near-Infrared
• Dust around massive stars is agnostic to galactic environment: New insights from PHAT/BEAST
• The Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys Emission Line Survey of Andromeda. I: Classical Be Stars
• The Local Ultraviolet to Infrared Treasury I. Survey Overview of the Broadband Imaging
• Revisiting the near infrared Calcium triplet as metallicity indicator
• PhotoD with LSST: Stellar Photometric Distances Out to the Edge of the Galaxy
• A Catalog of Stellar and Dust Properties for 500,000 Stars in the Southwest Bar of the Small Magellanic Cloud
• Stars Born in the Wind: M82's Outflow and Halo Star Formation
• There Are (super)Giants in the Sky: Searching for Misidentified Massive Stars in Algorithmically-Selected Quasar Catalogs
• The most distant optically polarised GRB afterglow: GRB 240419A at z = 5.178
• Isolated massive star candidates in NGC 4242 with GULP
• Topological models to infer multiphase interstellar medium properties
• The Treasury of Extremely Metal-Poor O Stars