Spectrophotometric parallaxes with linear models: Accurate distances for luminous red-giant stars

Abstract

With contemporary infrared spectroscopic surveys like APOGEE, red-giant stars can be observed to distances and extinctions at which Gaia parallaxes are not highly informative. Yet the combination of effective temperature, surface gravity, composition, and age - all accessible through spectroscopy - determines a giant's luminosity. Therefore spectroscopy plus photometry should enable precise spectrophotometric distance estimates. Here we use the APOGEE-Gaia-2MASS-WISE overlap to train a data-driven model to predict parallaxes for red-giant branch stars with $0<\log g\le 2.2$ (more luminous than the red clump). We employ (the exponentiation of) a linear function of APOGEE spectral pixel intensities and multi-band photometry to predict parallax spectrophotometrically. The model training involves no logarithms or inverses of the Gaia parallaxes, and needs no cut on the Gaia parallax signal-to-noise ratio. It includes an L1 regularization to zero out the contributions of uninformative pixels. The training is performed with leave-out subsamples such that no star's astrometry is used even indirectly in its spectrophotometric parallax estimate. The model implicitly performs a reddening and extinction correction in its parallax prediction, without any explicit dust model. We assign to each star in the sample a new spectrophotometric parallax estimate; these parallaxes have uncertainties of a few to 15 percent, depending on data quality, which is more precise than the Gaia parallax for the vast majority of targets, and certainly any stars more than a few kpc distance. We obtain 10-percent distance estimates out to heliocentric distances of $20$kpc, and make global maps of the Milky Way's disk.

arXiv commentSubmitted to ApJ, comments are welcome. All data can be downloaded here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1468053

References in corpus (24)

• Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy
• Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
• The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE): Mission Description and Initial On-orbit Performance
• The Astropy Project: Building an inclusive, open-science project and status of the v2.0 core package
• The Gaia mission
• Gaia Data Release 2: The astrometric solution
• The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)
• Estimating distances from parallaxes IV: Distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia Data Release 2
• Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV: Mapping the Milky Way, Nearby Galaxies, and the Distant Universe
• The merger that led to the formation of the Milky Way's inner stellar halo and thick disk
• ASPCAP: The Apogee Stellar Parameter and Chemical Abundances Pipeline
• Gaia Data Release 2: Catalogue validation
• The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from $5$ to $25$ kpc
• The Cannon: A data-driven approach to stellar label determination
• Red giant masses and ages derived from carbon and nitrogen abundances
• StarHorse: A Bayesian tool for determining stellar masses, ages, distances, and extinctions for field stars
• Spectroscopic determination of masses (and implied ages) for red giants
• Confirmation of the $Gaia$ DR2 parallax zero-point offset using asteroseismology and spectroscopy in the $Kepler$ field
• Simultaneous calibration of spectro-photometric distances and the Gaia DR2 parallax zero-point offset with deep learning
• APOGEE: The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment
• Label Transfer from APOGEE to LAMOST: Precise Stellar Parameters for 450,000 LAMOST Giants
• The Galactic Disc in Action Space as seen by Gaia DR2
• Galactic Doppelganger: The chemical similarity among field stars and among stars with a common birth origin
• Extinction Maps towards the Milky Way Bulge: 2D and 3D Tests with APOGEE

Cited by in corpus (35)

• Gaia Early Data Release 3: Parallax bias versus magnitude, colour, and position
• The Milky Way total mass profile as inferred from Gaia DR2
• Overview of the DESI Milky Way Survey
• The chemical characterisation of halo substructure in the Milky Way based on APOGEE
• The Inside-out Growth of the Galactic Disk
• Detection of the Keplerian decline in the Milky Way rotation curve
• The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from 5 to 25 kpc using luminous red giant branch star
• Metallicity and $\alpha$-element Abundance Gradients along the Sagittarius Stream as Seen by APOGEE
• A direct measurement of the distance to the Galactic center using the kinematics of bar stars
• Evidence from Disrupted Halo Dwarfs that $r$-process Enrichment via Neutron Star Mergers is Delayed by $\gtrsim 500$ Myrs
• Unicorns and Giraffes in the binary zoo: stripped giants with subgiant companions
• Stellar Abundance Maps of the Milky Way Disk
• The Three-Phase Evolution of the Milky Way
• Action-based distribution function modelling for constraining the shape of the Galactic dark matter halo
• Dynamical model of the Milky Way using APOGEE and Gaia data
• Data-driven spectroscopic estimates of absolute magnitude, distance and binarity -- method and catalog of 16,002 O- and B-type stars from LAMOST
• Phase-space Properties and Chemistry of the Sagittarius Stellar Stream Down to the Extremely Metal-poor ($[Fe/H]\lesssim -3$) Regime
• The Cetus-Palca stream: A disrupted small dwarf galaxy. A prequel to the science possible with WEAVE with precise spectro-photometric distances
• A first estimate of the Milky Way dark matter halo spin
• ATLAS Probe: Breakthrough Science of Galaxy Evolution, Cosmology, Milky Way, and the Solar System
• Impact of galactic distributions in celestial capture of dark matter
• Which Milky Way masses are consistent with the slightly declining 5-25 kpc rotation curve?
• Halo uncertainties in electron recoil events at direct detection experiments
• Universal properties of the high- and low-α disk: small intrinsic abundance scatter and migrating stars
• The "Giraffe": Discovery of a stripped red giant in an interacting binary with a $\sim 2M_{\odot }$ lower giant
• On the Galactic rotation curve inferred from the Jeans equations Assessing its robustness using Gaia DR3 and cosmological simulations
• A machine learning approach to photometric metallicities of giant stars
• 3D structure of the Milky Way out to 10 kpc from the Sun. Catalogue of large molecular clouds in the Galactic Plane
• Mapping Gaia parallax systematic errors over the sky with faint Milky Way stars
• A Simple Unified Spectroscopic Indicator of Stellar Luminosity: the Extended Flux Weighted Gravity-Luminosity Relationship
• Axial Asymmetry Studies in Gaia Data Release 2 Yield the Pattern Speed of the Galactic Bar
• Statistics for dark matter subhalo searches in gamma rays from a kinematically constrained population model: Fermi-LAT-like telescopes
• Decoding the RVb Enigma of DF Cyg: Pulsations, Circumstellar Disks, and Post-RGB Evolution Revealed by Multi-Wavelength Observations
• Dwarfs or giants? Stellar metallicities and distances in the Canada-France-Imaging-Survey from $ugrizG$ multi-band photometry
• Determination of the best dark matter profile for the Milky Way with Gaia DR3 using Bayesian Model Comparison