CLOVER: Convnet Line-fitting Of Velocities in Emission-line Regions

TL;DR

CLOVER is a convolutional neural network-based method that accurately classifies emission-line profiles into one-component, two-component, or noise-only categories, improving kinematic measurements in complex star-forming regions.

Contribution

The paper introduces CLOVER, a novel CNN-based approach that leverages spatial information to classify emission-line profiles and extract kinematics, outperforming traditional line-fitting techniques.

Findings

High classification accuracy (~99%) for one-component lines.

Near-perfect accuracy (~97-100%) for two-component and noise-only lines.

Effective on real observational data across various star-forming regions.

Abstract

When multiple star-forming gas structures overlap along the line-of-sight and emit optically thin emission at significantly different radial velocities, the emission can become non-Gaussian and often exhibits two distinct peaks. Traditional line-fitting techniques can fail to account adequately for these double-peaked profiles, providing inaccurate cloud kinematics measurements. We present a new method called Convnet Line-fitting Of Velocities in Emission-line Regions (CLOVER) for distinguishing between one-component, two-component, and noise-only emission lines using 1D convolutional neural networks trained with synthetic spectral cubes. CLOVER utilizes spatial information in spectral cubes by predicting on $3\times3$ pixel sub-cubes, using both the central pixel's spectrum and the average spectrum over the $3\times3$ grid as input. On an unseen set of 10,000 synthetic spectral cubes in each predicted class, CLOVER has classification accuracies of $\sim99\%$ for the one-component class and $\sim97\%$ for the two-component class. For the noise-only class, which is analogous to a signal-to-noise cutoff of four for traditional line-fitting methods, CLOVER has classification accuracy of $100\%$. CLOVER also has exceptional performance on real observations, correctly distinguishing between the three classes across a variety of star-forming regions. In addition, CLOVER quickly and accurately extracts kinematics directly from spectra identified as two-component class members. Moreover, we show that CLOVER is easily scalable to emission lines with hyperfine splitting, making it an attractive tool in the new era of large-scale NH$_3$ and N$_2$H$^+$ mapping surveys.