We develop a Principal Component Analysis aimed at classifying a sub-set of 27,350 spectra of galaxies in the range 0.4 < z < 1.0 collected by the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). We apply an iterative algorithm to simultaneously repair parts of spectra affected by noise and/or sky residuals, and reconstruct gaps due to rest-frame transformation, and obtain a set of orthogonal spectral templates that span the diversity of galaxy types. By taking the three most significant components, we find that we can describe the whole sample without contamination from noise. We produce a catalogue of eigen-coefficients and template spectra that will be part of future VIPERS data releases. Our templates effectively condense the spectral information into two coefficients that can be related to the age and star formation rate of the galaxies. We examine the spectrophotometric types in this space and identify early, intermediate, late and starburst galaxies.
@article{arxiv.1207.4374,
title = {The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS): spectral classification through Principal Component Analysis},
author = {A. Marchetti and B. R. Granett and L. Guzzo and A. Fritz and B. Garilli and M. Scodeggio and U. Abbas and C. Adami and S. Arnouts and M. Bolzonella and D. Bottini and A. Cappi and J. Coupon and O. Cucciati and G. De Lucia and S. de la Torre and P. Franzetti and M. Fumana and O. Ilbert and A. Iovino and J. Krywult and V. Le Brun and O. Le Fevre and D. Maccagni and K. Malek and F. Marulli and H. J. McCracken and B. Meneux and L. Paioro and M. Polletta and A. Pollo and H. Schlagenhaufer and L. Tasca and R. Tojeiro and D. Vergani and A. Zanichelli and J. Bel and M. Bersanelli and J. Blaizot and E. Branchini and A. Burden and I. Davidzon and C. Di Porto and L. Guennou and C. Marinoni and Y. Mellier and L. Moscardini and R. C. Nichol and J. A. Peacock and W. J. Percival and S. Phleps and C. Schimd and M. Wolk and G. Zamorani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.4374},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
15 pages, 20 images, accepted for publication in MNRAS: MN-12-1739-MJ.R1