Probabilistic positional association of astrophysical sources between catalogs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a probabilistic method for cross-identifying astrophysical sources across different catalogs, accounting for positional uncertainties and non-coincident source centers, enhancing source association accuracy.

Contribution

The paper presents a simple probabilistic approach to source association that handles unknown positional uncertainties and non-coincident centers, extending to one-to-one catalog associations.

Findings

Method effectively estimates positional uncertainties.

Applicable even with non-coincident source centers.

Can determine typical positional uncertainties from data.

Abstract

We describe a simple probabilistic method to cross-identify astrophysical sources from different catalogs and provide the probability that a source is associated with a source from another catalog or that it has no counterpart. When the positional uncertainty in one of the catalog is unknown, this method may be used to derive its typical value and even to study its dependence on the size of objects. It may also be applied when the true centers of a source and of its counterpart at another wavelength do not coincide. We extend this method to the case when there are only one-to-one associations between the catalogs.