The AstroStat Slog

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.3758v1
Numerical Color-Magnitude Diagram Analysis of SDSS Data and Application to the New Milky Way Satellites by J. T. A. de Jong et. al.

The authors applied MATCH (Dolphin, 2002^[1] -note that the year is corrected) to M13, M15, M92, NGC2419, NGC6229, and Pal14 (well known globular clusters), and BooI, BooII, CvnI, CVnII, Com, Her, LeoIV, LeoT, Segu1, UMaI, UMaII and Wil1 (newly discovered Milky Way satellites) from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to fit Color Magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of these stellar clusters and find the properties of these satellites.

A traditional CMD fitting begins with building synthetic CMDs: Completeness of SDSS Data Release 5, Hess diagram (a bivariate histogram from a CMD), and features in MATCH for CMD synthesis were taken into account. The synthetic CMDs of these well known globular clusters were utilized with the observations from SDSS and compared to previous discoveries to validate their modified MATCH for the SDSS data sets. Afterwards, their method was applied to the newly discovered Milky Way satellites and discussion on their findings of these satellites was presented.

The paper provides plots that enhance the understanding of age, metalicity, and other physical parameter distributions of stellar clusters after they were fit with synthetic CMDs. The paper also describes steps and tricks (to a statistician, the process of simulating stars looks very technical without a mathematical/probabilistic justification) to acquire proper synthetic CMDs that match observations. The paper adopted Padova database of stellar evolutionary tracks and isochrones (there are other databases beyond Padova).

At last, I’d like to add a sentence from their paper, which supports my idea that a priori knowledge in choosing a proper isochrone database is necessary.

In the case of M15, this is due to the blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars that are not properly reproduced by the theoretical isochrones, causing the code to fit them as a younger turn-off.

1. Numerical methods of star formation history measurement and applications to seven dwarf spheroidals,Dolphin (2002), MNRAS, 332, p. 91[↩]