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Disentangled Representation Learning for Astronomical Chemical Tagging

de Mijolla, D; Ness, MK; Viti, S; Wheeler, AJ; (2021) Disentangled Representation Learning for Astronomical Chemical Tagging. The Astrophysical Journal , 913 (1) , Article 12. 10.3847/1538-4357/abece1. Green open access

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Abstract

Modern astronomical surveys are observing spectral data for millions of stars. These spectra contain chemical information that can be used to trace the Galaxy's formation and chemical enrichment history. However, extracting the information from spectra and making precise and accurate chemical abundance measurements is challenging. Here we present a data-driven method for isolating the chemical factors of variation in stellar spectra from those of other parameters (i.e., Teff, log g, [Fe/H]). This enables us to build a spectral projection for each star with these parameters removed. We do this with no ab initio knowledge of elemental abundances themselves and hence bypass the uncertainties and systematics associated with modeling that rely on synthetic stellar spectra. To remove known nonchemical factors of variation, we develop and implement a neural network architecture that learns a disentangled spectral representation. We simulate our recovery of chemically identical stars using the disentangled spectra in a synthetic APOGEE-like data set. We show that this recovery declines as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio but that our neural network architecture outperforms simpler modeling choices. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of data-driven abundance-free chemical tagging.

Type: Article
Title: Disentangled Representation Learning for Astronomical Chemical Tagging
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/abece1
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/abece1
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10128422
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