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Published in:
2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
A Photometric Machine-Learning Method to Infer Stellar Metallicity
Author : Adam A. Miller
Published in: Databases in Networked Information Systems
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Following its formation, a star’s metal content is one of the few factors that can significantly alter its evolution. Measurements of stellar metallicity ([Fe/H]) typically require a spectrum, but spectroscopic surveys are limited to a few×10
6
targets; photometric surveys, on the other hand, have detected > 10
9
stars. I present a new machine-learning method to predict [Fe/H] from photometric colors measured by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The training set consists of ~120,000 stars with SDSS photometry and reliable [Fe/H] measurements from the SEGUE Stellar Parameters Pipeline (SSPP). For bright stars (
g
′ ≤ 18 mag), with 4500 K ≤
t
eff
≤ 7000 K, corresponding to those with the most reliable SSPP estimates, I find that the model predicts [Fe/H] values with a root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) of ~0.27 dex. The RMSE from this machine-learning method is similar to the scatter in [Fe/H] measurements from low-resolution spectra.