Fitting galaxy spectra with STECKMAP: a user guide

TL;DR

STECKMAP is a publicly available software tool that interprets galaxy spectra to derive stellar populations, star formation history, and kinematics using a regularized fitting approach, with this paper serving as a user guide.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive user guide for STECKMAP, detailing setup, usage, and interpretation of results for galaxy spectral analysis.

Findings

STECKMAP effectively derives stellar populations and kinematics from galaxy spectra.

The software is widely adopted in the astronomical community.

Regularization improves the stability and reliability of spectral fitting.

Abstract

STECKMAP stands for STEllar Content and Kinematics via Maximum A Posteriori likelihood. It is a tool for interpreting galaxy spectra in terms of their stellar populations, through the derivation of their star formation history, age-metallicity relation, kinematics and extinction. To do so, the observed spectrum is projected onto a temporal sequence of models of single stellar populations, so as to determine a linear combination of these models, that fit the observed spectrum best. The weights of the various components of this linear combination indicate the stellar content of the population. This procedure is regularized using various penalizing functions. The principles of the method are detailed in Ocvirk et al. 2006a,b. The STECKMAP software package is public and freely available at https://github.com/pocvirk/STECKMAP. A number of authors have already adopted it and use it in their daily research. This user guide aims at accompanying the user through the setup and first runs of STECKMAP. The last chapter will help the user to understand and improve his results and experience with the code.