The AstroStat Slog

From arxiv/astro-ph:0708.4030v1
Deep ACS Imaging in the Globular Cluster NGC 6397: The Cluster Color Magnitude Diagram and Luminosity Function by H.B. Richer et.al

This paper presented an observational study of a globular cluster, named NGC 6397, enhanced and more informative compared to previous observations in a sense that 1) a truncation in the white dwarf cooling sequence occurs at 28 magnitude, 2) the cluster main sequence seems to terminate approximately at the hydrogen-burning limit predicted by two independent stellar evolution models, and 3) luminosity functions (LFs) or mass functions (MFs) are well defined. Nothing statistical, but the idea of defining color magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and LFs described in the paper, will assist developing suitable statistics on CMD and LF fitting problems in addition to the improved measurements (ACS imaging) of stars in NGC 6397.

Instead of adding details of data properties and calibration process including the instrument characteristics, I like to add a few things for statisticians: First, ACS stands for Advance Camera of Surveys and its information can be found at this link. Second, NGC is an abbreviation of New General Catalogue, one of astronomers’ cataloging systems (click for its wiki). Third, CMDs and LFs are results of data processing, described in the paper, but can be considered as scatter plots and kernel density plots (histograms) to be analyzed for inferencing physical parameters. This data processing, or calibration requires multi-level transformations, which cause error propagation. Finally, the chi-square method is incorporated to fit LFs and MFs. Among numerous fitting methods, in astronomy, only the chi-square is ubiquitously used (link to a discussion on the chi-square). Could we develop more robust statistics for fitting astronomical (empirical) functions?