Photometric metallicity prediction of fundamental-mode RR Lyrae stars in the gaia optical and Ks infrared wave bands by deep learning

RR Lyrae stars are useful chemical tracers thanks to the empirical relationship between their heavy-element abundance and the shape of their light curves. However, the consistent and accurate calibration of this relation across multiple photometric wave bands has been lacking. We have devised a new...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dékány, István (Author) , Grebel, Eva K. (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 2022 July 29
In: The astrophysical journal. Supplement series
Year: 2022, Volume: 261, Issue: 2, Pages: 1-14
ISSN:1538-4365
DOI:10.3847/1538-4365/ac74ba
Online Access:Resolving-System, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/ac74ba
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Author Notes:István Dékány and Eva K. Grebel
Description
Summary:RR Lyrae stars are useful chemical tracers thanks to the empirical relationship between their heavy-element abundance and the shape of their light curves. However, the consistent and accurate calibration of this relation across multiple photometric wave bands has been lacking. We have devised a new method for the metallicity estimation of fundamental-mode RR Lyrae stars in the Gaia optical G and near-infrared VISTA K s wave bands by deep learning. First, an existing metallicity prediction method is applied to large photometric data sets, which are then used to train long short-term memory recurrent neural networks for the regression of the [Fe/H] to the light curves in other wave bands. This approach allows an unbiased transfer of our accurate, spectroscopically calibrated I-band formula to additional bands at the expense of minimal additional noise. We achieve a low mean absolute error of 0.1 dex and high R 2 regression performance of 0.84 and 0.93 for the K s and G bands, respectively, measured by cross-validation. The resulting predictive models are deployed on the Gaia DR2 and VVV inner bulge RR Lyrae catalogs. We estimate mean metallicities of −1.35 dex for the inner bulge and −1.7 dex for the halo, which are significantly less than the values obtained by earlier photometric prediction methods. Using our results, we establish a public catalog of photometric metallicities of over 60,000 Galactic RR Lyrae stars and provide an all-sky map of the resulting RR Lyrae metallicity distribution. The software code used for training and deploying our recurrent neural networks is made publicly available in the open-source domain.
Item Description:Im Titel ist der Buchstabe "s" bei "Ks" tiefgestellt
Gesehen am 17.08.2022
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:1538-4365
DOI:10.3847/1538-4365/ac74ba