Estimating of ages and metallicities of M31 star clusters from LAMOST DR6 [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2011.11853


Context. Determination of the metallicities and ages of M31 clusters is fundamental to the studies of the formation and evolution of M31 itself. The Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) has carried out a systematic spectroscopic campaign of clusters and candidates in M31. Aims. We construct a catalogue of 346 M31 clusters observed by LAMOST. By combining the information of the LAMOST spectra and the multi-band photometry, we develope a new algorithm to estimate the metallicities and ages of these clusters. Methods. We distinguish young clusters from the old using Random Forest classifiers based on a empirical training data set selected from the literature. Ages of young clusters are derived from the spectral energy distribution (SED) fits of their multi-band photometric measurements. Their metallicities are estimated by fitting their observed spectral principal components extracted from the LAMOST spectra with those from the young metal-rich single stellar population (SSP) models. For old clusters, we have built non-parameter Random Forest models between the spectral principal components/multi-band colours and the parameters of the clusters based on a training data set constructed from the SSP models. Ages and metallicities of the old clusters are then estimated by fitting their observed spectral principal components extracted from the LAMOST spectra and multi-band colours from the photometric measurements with the resultant Random Forest models. Results. We have derived parameters of 53 young and 293 old clusters in our catalogue. Our resultant parameters are in good agreement with those from the literatures. Ages of about 30 catalogued clusters and metallicities of about 40 sources are derived for the first time.

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S. Wang, B. Chen and J. Ma
Wed, 25 Nov 2020
51/65

Comments: 12 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in A&A