The Hierarchical Structure of Galactic Haloes: Differentiating Clusters from Stochastic Clumping with AstroLink

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Hauptverfasser: Oliver, William H., Elahi, Pascal J., Lewis, Geraint F., Buck, Tobias
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Oliver, William H.
Elahi, Pascal J.
Lewis, Geraint F.
Buck, Tobias
author_facet Oliver, William H.
Elahi, Pascal J.
Lewis, Geraint F.
Buck, Tobias
contents We present AstroLink, an efficient and versatile clustering algorithm designed to hierarchically classify astrophysically-relevant structures from both synthetic and observational data sets. We build upon CluSTAR-ND, a hierarchical galaxy/(sub)halo finder, so that AstroLink now generates a two-dimensional representation of the implicit clustering structure as well as ensuring that clusters are statistically distinct from the noisy density fluctuations implicit within the $n$-dimensional input data. This redesign replaces the three cluster extraction parameters from CluSTAR-ND with a single parameter, $S$ -- the lower statistical significance threshold of clusters, which can be automatically and reliably estimated via a dynamical model-fitting process. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach compared to AstroLink's predecessors by applying each algorithm to a suite of simulated galaxies defined over various feature spaces. We find that AstroLink delivers a more powerful clustering performance while being $\sim27\%$ faster and using less memory than CluSTAR-ND. With these improvements, AstroLink is ideally suited to extracting a meaningful set of hierarchical and arbitrarily-shaped astrophysical clusters from both synthetic and observational data sets -- lending itself as a great tool for morphological decomposition within the context of hierarchical structure formation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_14632
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Hierarchical Structure of Galactic Haloes: Differentiating Clusters from Stochastic Clumping with AstroLink
Oliver, William H.
Elahi, Pascal J.
Lewis, Geraint F.
Buck, Tobias
Astrophysics of Galaxies
We present AstroLink, an efficient and versatile clustering algorithm designed to hierarchically classify astrophysically-relevant structures from both synthetic and observational data sets. We build upon CluSTAR-ND, a hierarchical galaxy/(sub)halo finder, so that AstroLink now generates a two-dimensional representation of the implicit clustering structure as well as ensuring that clusters are statistically distinct from the noisy density fluctuations implicit within the $n$-dimensional input data. This redesign replaces the three cluster extraction parameters from CluSTAR-ND with a single parameter, $S$ -- the lower statistical significance threshold of clusters, which can be automatically and reliably estimated via a dynamical model-fitting process. We demonstrate the robustness of this approach compared to AstroLink's predecessors by applying each algorithm to a suite of simulated galaxies defined over various feature spaces. We find that AstroLink delivers a more powerful clustering performance while being $\sim27\%$ faster and using less memory than CluSTAR-ND. With these improvements, AstroLink is ideally suited to extracting a meaningful set of hierarchical and arbitrarily-shaped astrophysical clusters from both synthetic and observational data sets -- lending itself as a great tool for morphological decomposition within the context of hierarchical structure formation.
title The Hierarchical Structure of Galactic Haloes: Differentiating Clusters from Stochastic Clumping with AstroLink
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14632