Blind nucleosynthetic source discovery in astronomical elemental abundance data
Abstract
We demonstrate physics-blind and purely data-based nucleosynthetic archetype discovery from heterogeneous stellar elemental abundance measurements. Archetype extraction is performed via non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). Because stellar elemental abundance measurements can be incomplete and sparsely sampled, we perform combined low-rank NMF and matrix completion on the Hypatia Catalog and JINAbase to extract archetypal elemental abundance patterns, the so-called endmembers, and impute the missing measurements. We qualitatively compare the discovered nucleosynthetic archetypes to patterns anticipated from direct astrophysical nucleosynthetic calculations. Our tentative results indicate that the physics-blind analysis relying entirely on the incomplete chemical mixing in star formation can discern nucleosynthetic archetypes associated with asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stellar sources of the s-process, thermonuclear supernovae, and non-thermonuclear supernovae with an r-process.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1809.02660,
title = {Blind nucleosynthetic source discovery in astronomical elemental abundance data},
author = {Milos Milosavljevic and Patrick D. Aleo and Natalie R. Hinkel and Haris Vikalo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.02660},
year = {2018}
}