SDSS Quasars Spectra Fitting - SupercomputingSDSS类星体光谱拟合计算.ppt

SDSS Quasars Spectra Fitting N. Kuropatkin, C. Stoughton IntroductionChris Stoughton Quasars are complex objects. A swirling cloud of gas and plasma falling into a black hole glows at many different wavelengths. Astronomers measure this spectrum of light to measure the properties of each quasar. The model we fit to the spectrum includes the following components: power-law continuum, decreasing as exp(-lambda) a Balmer Continuum due to ionized Hydrogen, with a characteristic bump from 2000 to 4000 Angstroms strong emission lines from ionized gas, such as Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and Magnesium. many faint emission lines from Iron starlight from the galaxy that surrounds the quasar. We vary the values of the parameters in this model to search for the parameters set that minimizes chi-squared. Since this includes hundreds of parameters, we used a genetic algorithm to find a good estimate of the parameters set with the best chi-squared. The genetic algorithm keeps track of 100 sets of parameters. Borrowing terms from biology, we call one set of parameters a chromosome, and each parameter is a gene. We start by generating 100 random chromosomes, using reasonable ranges for the value of each gene. We calculate chi-squared for each chromosome and sort the results in order of increasing chi-squared. We then do 100 iterations of the following steps: save the first chromosome (the fittest survives) for the next 20 chromosomes, perturb the gene values by 1 sigma for the next 20 chromosomes, perturb the gene values by 5 sigma for the next 20 chromosomes, breed them by taking some genes from one parent and the rest of the genes from another parent remove the remaining chromosomes and replace them with randomly generated ones sort these new chromosomes in order of increasing chi-squared At the end of these iterations, declare the first chromosome to be the estimate of the best chi-squared fit. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has measured the spectrum of tens of