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abstract
Session 28 - Double Stars.
Display session, Tuesday, June 10
South Main Hall,
The separation of combined spectra into its constituent parts remains a difficult and necessary task for the analysis of many stellar and non-stellar astronomical sources. If the components vary independently, as in eclipsing binary systems, then with a large enough dataset, it is possible to reduce the number of independent parameters far below those currently used in this type of analysis. We present a new method which reduces the number of free parameters to the minimum required for specification of the data. Employing methods similar to those used in Principal Component Analysis (PCA) a set of spectra may be analyzed and the number of sources determined. The number of free parameters necessary to uniquely specify the spectra depends on the number of sources present, but in the simplest case may be as low as two. A by-product of this analysis is the ability to form k-dimensional averages which improve data quality of each spectrum in a set.
