Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2000-05-15
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 323 (2001) 270
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
submitted to MNRAS, 17 pages, Latex, with 14 figures embedded
Scientific paper
10.1046/j.1365-8711.2001.04125.x
A new method for classification of galaxy spectra is presented, based on a recently introduced information theoretical principle, the `Information Bottleneck'. For any desired number of classes, galaxies are classified such that the information content about the spectra is maximally preserved. The result is classes of galaxies with similar spectra, where the similarity is determined via a measure of information. We apply our method to approximately 6000 galaxy spectra from the ongoing 2dF redshift survey, and a mock-2dF catalogue produced by a Cold Dark Matter-based semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. We find a good match between the mean spectra of the classes found in the data and in the models. For the mock catalogue, we find that the classes produced by our algorithm form an intuitively sensible sequence in terms of physical properties such as colour, star formation activity, morphology, and internal velocity dispersion. We also show the correlation of the classes with the projections resulting from a Principal Component Analysis.
Lahav Ofer
Slonim Noam
Somerville Rachel
Tishby Naftali
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