Spectral Classification of Galaxies using the Principal Component Analysis: a Web Based Tool

TL;DR

This paper introduces a web-based tool that applies Principal Component Analysis to galaxy spectra for spectral classification, facilitating morphological categorization from ellipticals to star-forming galaxies.

Contribution

The paper presents a user-friendly online platform for PCA-based spectral classification of galaxies, enabling easy analysis without software installation.

Findings

The tool effectively classifies galaxies along the morphological sequence.

It correlates PCA projections with known galaxy types.

Accessible via a web interface without downloads.

Abstract

We have developed a web tool to perform Principal Component Analysis (PCA, Murtagh & Heck 1987; Kendall 1980) onto spectral data. The method is especially designed to perform spectral classification of galaxies from a sample of input spectra, giving the set of orthonormal vectors called Principal Components (PCs) and the corresponding projections. The first two projections of the galaxy spectra onto the PCs are known to correlate with the morphological type (Connolly et al. 1995) and, following Galaz & de Lapparent (1998), we use the parameters \delta and \theta which define a spectral classification sequence of typical galaxies from ellipticals to late spirals and star-forming galaxies. The program runs in the website http://azul.astro.puc.cl/PCA/ and can be used without downloading any binary files or building archives of any kind.