Software for the Spectral Analysis of Hot Stars

TL;DR

This paper presents a Virtual Observatory service that enables access, comparison, and calculation of stellar synthetic energy distributions for hot stars, facilitating automated spectral analysis and detailed modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a VO service integrating pre-calculated and on-demand stellar SEDs, allowing flexible, automated spectral analysis of hot stars using static and expanding non-LTE models.

Findings

Access to pre-calculated SEDs simplifies analysis.

On-demand model calculations are feasible within reasonable time.

The service supports automated spectral analysis workflows.

Abstract

In a collaboration of the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) and AstroGrid-D, the German Astronomy Community Grid (GACG), we provide a VO service for the access and the calculation of stellar synthetic energy distributions (SEDs) based on static as well as expanding non-LTE model atmospheres. At three levels, a VO user may directly compare observed and theoretical SEDs: The easiest and fastest way is to use pre-calculated SEDs from the GAVO database. For individual objects, grids of model atmospheres and SEDs can be calculated on the compute resources of AstroGrid-D within reasonable wallclock time. Experienced VO users may even create own atomic-data files for a more detailed analysis. This VO service opens also the perspective for a new approach to an automated spectral analysis of a large number of observations, e.g. provided by multi-object spectrographs.